The pointed, tiled roof is iconic, and nostalgia-inducing. It’s the architecture that put the ”hut” in Pizza Hut, and now it can be spotted around the world on buildings from churches to Chinese restaurants.
Photographer Ho Hai Tran and his creative partner Chloe Cahill have spent the past two years chasing down former Pizza Huts across Australia and America, to photograph the familiar roof in all sorts of incarnations.
“The idea came from driving past one hut in particular that’s now a Salvation Army store. It was clearly a Pizza Hut, and we found its ability to transport us back to our childhoods quite remarkable,” Cahill wrote to Quartz in an email. They even found a funeral home in one former Pizza Hut.
Vacant, West Palm Beach, FL, USA.
“We planned the trip meticulously,” Tran said. “We had done our research and knew some locations in advance from addresses found in casual conversations in [online] forums.”
Cahill and Tran’s obsession with the afterlives of these fast food restaurants is shared by a small community of people on the internet. The locations of former Pizza Huts are actually well documented on UsedToBeaPizzaHut.com.
Tran and Cahill recently raised over $15,000 on Kickstarter to self-publish a book of their photographs.
