As part of my duties on the board of AIGA San Francisco, I was involved with the production of Compostmodern 08, a sustainability conference put on by AIGA and my graduate program director Phil Hamlett at the Center for Sustainable Design on January 19th. During the day's events, in which I coordinated A/V speaker presentations, I saw Jacinta McCann, architect with edaw, give a talk about the firm's latest work around the world. This talk prompted my purchase of Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy by Anna Klingmann at the Compostmodern bookstore run by Stacy's of San Francisco. Brandscapes is an incredibly valuable work. While researching THEMERICA™, one of my more formidable tasks has been to define what I term 'theming' in relation to other forms of commercial and entertainment architecture. Where does branding end and theming begin? Where do they intersect? What is the design criteria? Klingmann is a scholar who is interested in how architecture has evolved from modernism at the height of the twentieth century, to post-modernism and beyond at the dawn of the 21st. She discusses commercial spaces in the context of the 'experience economy'—the current state of the service sector that is fundamentally about not what the consumer buys, but how they feel.
Klingmann's central contention—boiled down—is that architecture has evolved from the modernist ideal, "the perfection of the object" to "the transformation of the subject." I had hinted at this kind of development in my original thesis proposal, but I did not have the language to flesh it out in my head, exactly. Reading Brandscapes—the name Klingmann gives to this new form of architecture—has set my thinking in a particular direction now.
I am coming to see thematic environments and branded spaces as two distinct spheres that overlap. A vector runs between two extremes; on the far end of the thematic spectrum is pure simulation; a replica of a historical and/or cultural reference. The narrative elements in such an extreme are completely external. On the far end of the branded spaces is pure brand. The narrative is completely internal (what Alan Bryman calls "self-reflexive theming") and refers only to the iconography of the brand. This gradient is what divides the Ghost Town of Knott's Berry Farm or the jungles of Rain Forest Cafe from the Niketowns and McDonald's of the world. everything else, from works of the Jon Jerde Partnership such as Universal CityWalk and Horton Plaza, lies in between somewhere.