Architecture

A white machine for eating.

The building looks like Richard Meier designed it. The first one landed on Grand Avenue in Des Moines; the same white box is in ten cities now. The name is the other joke: Ronnie, the nickname the decade used for Ronald Reagan. Somebody plugged in a jukebox and called it morning.

The white enamel pavilion in full sun: cylinder, window grid, ramp, and rooftop railings.
Porcelain-enamel panels, a punched square grid, a cylinder of glass. Photographed like a museum because, from the curb, it is one.

The Meier language, without the museum hours.

White porcelain-enameled aluminum. A relentless grid of square windows. Pipe railings. A shallow ramp that would be at home at the High Museum or MACBA. A thin cantilevered canopy. The volumes read as a ship that decided to become a restaurant.

Meier spent the 1980s making buildings that looked washed by light including an addtion to the Des Moines Art Center — the Getty still ahead of him, the white pavilions already a signature. Ronnie’s pavilion is an homage, not a commission: a fictional piece of high modernism doing the most American job possible.

Close-up of the white facade grid, hard noon shadows on enamel, a hint of interior neon.
The grid does the talking. Neon only leaks through after dark.
Night view along white pipe railings toward square windows glowing magenta and cyan.
After sunset the white box becomes a lantern. The diner is the lamp.
The diner counter: red stools, chrome, pie case, magenta neon.

Then you go inside, and the slogan is still true.

Opened in 1986, named for the man the country called Ronnie. Morning in America, except the coffee is bottomless and the neon never got the memo to come down. The week of the World Series the checkerboard went in and a jukebox was dragged across the white plaza on a moving blanket.

The interior has been repaired, never restyled. Vinyl replaced with the same red. Tile replaced with the same tile. The soda fountain still hisses. It is a fictional diner with a presidential nickname and a very serious flattop. It's the 80's in America again.

Hungry? The menu