Where the Queen once stood

By Pete Scully in Davis, California

One of the reasons I sketch urban is to record the changing face of the city I live in. I’m about to hit the ten-years-in-Davis mark (next week!) and I’ve certainly seen – and sketched – a lot of changes. One of those ‘changed locations’ is on Fifth Street, next to the railroad tracks, but this one is not simply a building knocked down and something new put up, but is a slightly more creative project. This is the location of Indigo, an Architect firm based in Davis who took over the space formerly occupied by the much-beloved (but never that busy) Dairy Queen restaurant. Indigo (Hammond and Playle) took that very distinctive wavy roof from the old DQ buidling and created a bright, modern but unintrusive structure. They have described it as a “Bioregional Building”, which sounds to me like they are taking a word, remodeling the word, keeping the word’s roof and making a new, modern eco-friendly word (in other words yes, I don’t know what “bioregional” means). Indigo explain their process for rebuilding the old Dairy Queen into a modern energy-efficient and “climate-adapted”office space on their website. As well as this award-winning structure they have also created an adjoining space which “clad in corrugated metal alludes to the agricultural vernacular of California’s Central Valley”. Of course. It may not however be as strikingly red as its predecessor, but it is surely a lot healthier.

Above is a sketch I made last year during the building process. Having sketched the Dairy Queen before and comiserated its demise with locals who loved taking their grandchildren there for ice cream, people in Davis were very excited to tell me that the architects were keeping the distinctive roof and that I had to go and sketch it. It did look a little sad, all gutted like that, but full of promise, like a statement to locals that the things they love wouldn’t be erased entirely (but they probably wouldn’t be keeping the chicken strips). Below, two of the sketches I did of the Dairy Queen over recent years, both of which sold at a local gallery (as I say, it was a popular building), now just a record of what is long gone. 

I never did try their cake.