Romeoville, Illinois, USA
After Primo Orpilla and his team at Studio O+A partnered with McDonald’s on a new corporate headquarters in Chicago’s West Loop, the San Francisco-based design firm shifted its attention to the Innovation Center for a similarly fresh look at the spaces where fresh looking is the principal activity of the day.
The project is a specialty facility for experimentation as a source for new products, new processes, new thinking to keep the company at the top of its industry through a period of epochal change.
The new colorful space is decorated with oversize graphics of patent designs and other innovation-themed images, while large glass doors and windows and writable surfaces encourage employees working on technological and culinary creations to intermingle and take their work anywhere—a departure from the building’s previous, mazelike layout.
This special facility for experimentation became a source of new products, new processes, new thinking that have kept the company at the top of its industry through a period of epochal change.
O+A’s first challenge was to pull out the improvised panels and black foam core that had turned the space into “a maze” and create the clear sightlines and uncluttered contexts that visionary work demands.
But the barriers removed were not just physical.
Over the years, it had become the Center’s custom to keep kitchen and office operations separate and their respective staffs apart.
The new Center encourages interaction in a shared café, gallery space and phone mezzanine and projects a welcoming brightness everywhere.
When McDonald’s teams from other countries come to the Innovation Center to test drive a new menu, logistics technology or kitchen configuration they need a temporary Central Command.
In the old space that was a conference room in a corner far removed from the kitchen.
O+A’s design repositioned it to an area directly adjacent to the action and equipped it with custom pivot doors that allow visiting innovators to run back and forth.
Despite the noise of a busy professional kitchen, those doors are almost always open.
When McDonald’s teams from other countries come to the Innovation Center to test drive a new menu, logistics technology, or kitchen configuration they need a temporary Central Command.
In the old space that was a conference room in a corner far removed from the kitchen.
O+A’s design repositioned it to an area directly adjacent to the action and equipped it with custom pivot doors that allow visiting innovators to run back and forth.
Despite the noise of a busy professional kitchen, those doors are almost always open.
Project: McDonald’s Innovation Center
Architects: Studio O+A
Design Team: Primo Orpilla, Mindi Weichman, Alex Bautista, Elizabeth Vereker, Paulina McFarland, and Kaylen Parker
Client: McDonald’s Corporation
Photographers: Garrett Rowland
