Stanley Meston

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanley Clark Meston (born January 7, 1910 in Oxnard , California, † December 30, 1992 ) was an American architect, best known for the Golden Arches .

Life

His parents were Bertha (1880-1921) and Alexander Milton Meston (1879-1932) from Massachusetts.

From 1910 Meston attended basic courses in design and architectural history at the Los Angeles Polytechnic High School before completing an apprenticeship with various architects. He was working in Earl Heitschmidt's office on the CBS Building in Hollywood when he was licensed as an architect in 1937. During the Great Depression , like other prominent architects, he worked for a time as a set designer for Universal Pictures. He married Margaret Adams Sercomb (1910-1998), with whom he had the children Stanley Sercomb Meston (* 1938 in Altadena; † 11 June 2006) and Jessica (* 1940 in Pasadena).

In Fontana , Bernadino County, he opened his own office with 2 to 8 employees, in which he mainly designed schools, urban office buildings and district facilities. He also worked for the architect Wayne McAllister , who had designed some Googie- style drive- through restaurants in Southern California . 1943–1945 he served in the US Navy in the War Plans Office in San Francisco. In 1947 he and Paul O. Davis had plans for Cemeston modular houses on offer. From 1951 he was a member of the American Institute of Architects .

When Richard McDonald had the idea of ​​integrating an arch as an eye-catcher and weather protection in his new drive-in in the fall of 1952, Meston was chosen as the architect, and he and his assistant Charles R. Fish (1925-2003) also designed the facade designed with stripes of red and white tiles. So that the guests would not be blinded by their own spotlights, he chose a glass curtain wall with an incline. Instead of a premium for each new restaurant (up 8% from $ 35,000), he opted for a flat fee. Of the six buildings he originally designed, the first in Phoenix in 1953, only one remained in Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles. Its design was largely retained when Kroc opened the first franchise unit in Des Plaines in 1955.

Around 1954 he designed the China Civic Center . In 1961 he founded the partnership Porter, Price and Meston in Fontana and about three years later Porter-Gogerty-Metson & Associates . From the mid-1960s he was a partner at Gogerty-Meston-Wilcox & Assocs. in Los Angeles.

The AIA Journal wrote in 1984: “Architect Stanley Meston translated commercial requirements for high visibility, appealing imagery, and operational efficiency into an economical, vivid, and delightful set of architectural forms. The design's energy and sleek materials exuberantly embody the technological optimism of the post World War II era. Its success as an urban design is clear in comparison with the bland clutter created by more recent, monotonously underscaled, tediously mansarded strip buildings dictated by currently fashionable "good taste." McDonald’s boldly scaled simplicity is a visual anchor for the eye wandering amid this stripscape . "

literature

  • Meston Genealogy. 1977; P. 102
  • Journal - The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. 1983; P. 113
  • The Origins of McDonald's Golden Arches. In: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 3/1986; Pp. 60-67
  • Alan Hess: Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture. P. 103

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/stanley-meston-obituary?pid=1000000018114763
  2. ↑ http://prabook.org/web/person-view.html?profileId=783825
  3. ↑ http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=14257022
  4. ↑ http://www.modernsandiego.com/BirdFujimotoFish.html
  5. ↑ https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/57390826/
  6. ↑ with Henry L. Gogerty (1894–1990) and Frank Stearns Wilcox (1929–1971)
  7. ↑ http://public.aia.org/sites/hdoaa/wiki/Wiki%20Pages/ahd4003760.aspx
  8. ^ Architecture: The AIA Journal - Volume 73 (1984), p. 6
personal data
SURNAME Meston, Stanley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meston, Stanley Clark (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American architect
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Oxnard , California
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1992