New McDonald's Pushkin Square, Moscow
New Design for Russia's Flagship McDonald's
30 years ago, Russia opened its first McDonald’s restaurant at Pushkin Square.
In the early 90’s, the store was hugely popular, with queues that snaked in the snow and all around Pushkin Square. Today the site is one of the highest trading McDonald’s restaurants globally.
Landini Associates have designed the newest evolution of the flagship McDonald’s that sits on the original site in Russia.
Built over three floors with multiple mezzanines, the new design is an experiment in “Non Design”; the intention is to make food the hero. The design has a “recognisable neutrality” that allows this to happen.
Concrete, glass, stainless steel, and oak form a palette of modern simplicity.
The colourful graphic environments that long ago became the signature for McDonald’s internationally have been replaced with a different approach. The walls of the store intermittently celebrate the menu items, with stylised laser cut line drawings of McDonald’s iconic products as well as archery, fries and coffee beans that nod to both the heritage and evolution of the brand.
Customers can customise their meal and pay for their orders at the modern interactive self-ordering kiosks in the entrance hall beneath an illuminated ceiling. Traditional service and pick up points for take away orders are adjacent to these.
Various seating types to accommodate families, groups & individuals
Pushkin Square has one of the highest guest counts globally of any McDonald’s restaurant and so the layout of seating throughout has been designed in response to maximize privacy, utilising mesh screens to achieve this. New seating types and areas have been designed to accommodate families, groups, and individuals. Zinc, concrete and oak tables and benches help define these zones, challenging customer’s historical perceptions of quick service restaurants by elevating the environment. A key addition unique to Pushkin Square is the introduction of a new FreeStyle Step Seating.
The look and feel of McCafe has evolved to be entirely timber to make it feel warmer and more inviting to customers and to differentiate the independently serviced café from the rest of the restaurant.
Throughout the store, mirrored ceilings are used to increase perceptions of height, open views and reflect the iconic Pushkin Square, creating energy in the space whilst still allowing it to be a place of calm and respite, ‘a bubble of happy’, from the outside world. A new lighting scheme has been conceived to deliver a calmer, more intimate experience that encourages customers to slow down and relax.
Landini’s design, “Project Ray” is named after the brand’s founder and is a radical evolution for McDonald’s.
Pushkin Square is an evolution of Landini’s global format for McDonald’s, Project Ray, named after the brand’s founder Ray Kroc. Iterations of the Ray Concept have been rolled out across Australia, Asia, Europe and America, most recently at the McDonald’s Headquarters Global Menu Restaurant in Chicago and the famous Rock n’ Roll Restaurant (Chicago), New York’s Times Square, San Francisco, Moscow, Madrid and Buenos Aries, Milan, Beijing, Tokyo and Dubai.
McDonald’s Pushkin Square, Moscow
Project credits:
Address: Bolshaya Bronnaya Ulitsa, 29 Moscow Russia, 123104
Size: 1087 sq m
Client: McDonald’s
Design: Landini Associates (Ray Concept, Interior and Graphic Design)
Photography: Andrew Meredith
Original opening: January 31, 1990
Latest interior remodel completion: January 2020
