McDonald's Floating Restaurant, Systems of Support of a Three Layer Big Mac, Sketch

James Wines’ firm SITE was founded as a practice for “de-architecture,” focusing on inverting and complicating architectural convention. Central to this endeavor is his belief that art has been relegated to the status of decoration in contemporary society. As a response, SITE treats architecture and art as a hybrid practice and a social extension of a building’s context. The firm became famous for a series of showrooms for the Best Products Company, which were designed as humorous environmental sculptures with trompe l’oeil facades or elaborate displays like a building-sized terrarium. SITE designed a special restaurant for McDonald’s in a similar vein. Although the realized building is fairly conventional, an early design by SITE playfully explores the idea of the restaurant as a giant Big Mac. This design is in many ways the perfect embodiment of architect Robert Venturi’s “Duck” theory, a kind of iconography in which a building’s space, structure, and program are fully subsumed into an overall symbolic form.