contact office magazine #29

Offices from around the world
Quarter Pounder
with cheese.
Last year, McDonald’s moved its headquarters from Oak Brook to Downtown Chicago, a distance of
30 kilometres. The new office with its stacked departments makes such a healthy and comfortable
impression that you wonder when their food will follow this successful trend. A highlight is the wellness
suites set up on each floor with quiet rooms, a library and a prayer room. I’m lovin’ it.
employees moved to Randolph Street, Downtown
Chicago.
The eight-story building designed by Gensler Architects
looks amazingly tasteful. The brick façade with
its steel strips and square glass panels doesn’t give in to
the tried and tested McDonald’s aesthetic. Rather, the
50,000 square-metre structure incorporates the construction
materials typical of Chicago and conforms to
the plot like an obvious piece of a jigsaw, where once
there was a sober warehouse and logistics hall. Three
partitioned entrances lead into the office headquarters,
into the so-called Hamburger University, where
future employees and franchisees are trained, and into
the McDonald’s global menu restaurant where you can
find all the burgers, fries and shakes on the menu that
are sold all over the world.
© Garrett Rowland
At the centre of the building, a giant atrium with
glazed walkways, galleries and stairways and landings
running criss-crossed hither and thither, seemingly
jerkily. Here and there, glazed meeting spaces over
several floors protrude into the empty space, as if
you wanted to have a curious peek in or out. And
between all this, there is an installation by New York
artiest Jacob Hashimoto hanging from the ceiling and
filling the room. The oeuvre is called A Gateway to a
Whispered Possibility of Existence, and it consists
of hundreds of coloured, patterned, sometimes
weightlessly translucent kites made from bamboo,
resin and acrylic. It is as if you were caught in an exhilarating
dream – somewhere between flower power,
M. C. Escher and the elegance of a recently opened
Louis Vuitton flagship store. For 47 years, McDonald’s
headquarters has been at its traditional address in
Oak Brook, situated around 30 kilometres west of
Chicago. The offices were scattered over several
buildings arranged across a large, green campus.
With the identity change away from the suburban
fast-food provider, however, to the urban lifestyle
restaurant, as the burger empire likes to claim, the
necessary symbolic step must also be made on a
management level. In 2018, the company gave
up the campus at the edge of the city and all 2,000
© Garrett Rowland
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