Ever see a business that’s housed in what was clearly a former Pizza Hut? Ho Hai Tran and Chloe Cahill spent a couple of years photographing repurposed Pizza Huts for their book Pizza Hunt. Following a successful Kickstarter, the book is now available.
Pizza Hut holds a place of reverence for many, because of its outsize role in making pizza a fond childhood memory and a national cuisine.
As Pizza Hut explains on their corporate site:
The red roof design didn’t come along until 1969, when the restaurant brand started to grow internationally. The two brothers began to worry about competition, and started to think about new, creative ways to distinguish their Pizza Hut restaurants. The brothers called up a college friend and fraternity brother who happened to be an architect and artist in Wichita: Richard D. Burke. As the story goes, Burke had originally charged the brothers a hefty upfront fee that the fledgling pizza start-up wasn’t able to scrape together. Instead, they offered Burke $100 per store built using his design, never guessing that Pizza Hut would become the global company that it is today.
As tastes changed and delivery skyrocketed, many Pizza Hut franchises closed, only to reopen as another business that kept most or all of its iconic architecture. Pizza Hunt documents the paint stores, churches, insurance companies, and restaurants that, like hermit crabs, have taken residence in the discarded shell of a Pizza Hut.
• Pizza Hunting (via Hyperallergic)