A classmate sent me an interesting article the other day, from his alma mater's magazine at Washington State University, called Meditations on a Strip Mall. The author David Wang, Professor of Architecture at WSU’s Spokane Interdisciplinary Design Institute, makes some interesting observations about the often arbitrary theming of strip malls in his home of Eastern Washington. "The everyday buildings we build around us want to be anything but everyday. They want to be stage sets of somewhere else. and their proliferation seems to suggest that everywhere we Americans go, we want to be somewhere else," Wang writes. This is a primary characteristic of thematic design, and one of the criteria which I use to distinguish thematic environments from branded spaces and other forms of entertainment architecture—the ability to transport the visitor to another time and place. Niketown may feel like Nike, but it doesn't take its audience away from the city and year that it sits in. I would use the same criteria to call Rainforest Cafe, but not Hard Rock Cafe, thematic design. both project themes in a sociological sense, but only one is theming in terms of design language.
"Why has architecture become an exercise in stage set building?" Wang asks. His answers echo my own sentiments when he talks about industrialization and modernism as stripping space of the symbolic purpose it once had in human society. He calls classical spaces "transcendental," and then argues that the industrial revolution pushed us to crave the "natural." Whereas in the twentieth and now twenty-first century, our reaction to modernism has made us crave the "virtual." Hence the explosion of—in Wang's strip mall examples, nonsensical—theming in every aspect of american society.
What wang doesn't address—and I will with Themerica—is not necessarily why architecture become an exercise in stage set building, but how. It's been a long road since Walt Disney's rejection of the Luckman & Pereira masterplan for Disneyland in 1953 (hiring Hollywood art directors to do it instead)—and Themerica will chart that road.