Jollibee

Two structural problems, solved before the drawings closed

Jollibee is the largest fast-food chain in Asia and the ninth largest in the world — bigger than Burger King, and genuinely loved by its customers. Before construction began, ACT's managing member Brad Hollett travelled to California to see how the chain's current restaurants were being built and where the inefficiencies were. That trip is the integrated-design method in miniature: learn how it gets built before deciding how to draw it.

Jollibee's new prototype carried an extended angled front soffit, and it set two problems. The first was structural: how to hold a wing that large against an existing block wall never designed for those pressures. The second was water: how to take the large volumes of Florida rain off that extended soffit and move it away without a downspout the public could see. Both were solved, and the finished building reads as a single clean gesture rather than a set of compromises.

Opening week drew record crowds and sold over $350,000. The store has been a Jacksonville favourite ever since. The first Jollibee in the United States opened in 1998 in Daly City, California, serving the Filipino and Filipino-American families living there; the chain has since made a point of earning its place in every community it enters.