Eighth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Discussions about our contemporary built environment tend to look at themed and online spaces as something irrelevant at best or, worse, as something disdainful. Our polemic: Entertainment, as a visual and experiential thrust, has consumed the built environment to the point that nothing escapes theming. Granted, physical and imagined spaces have always conveyed narrative; there have always been themes. Yet, what we term thematic design is something quite different. It is a form of visual storytelling executed primarily in consumer spaces that is at once popular, profitable, prolific, and above all, problematic. We reject the more conventional terminology “Architecture of Entertainment” and posit that thematic design, owing to its roots in the motion picture industry of the early twentieth century, now challenges the very primacy of the architect, elevating instead the role of the creative director. Thematic design is not the architecture of anything. Art direction (in the cinematic tradition) itself, in the thematic mode, becomes “The Mother Art.” We outline and mine the genealogy of themed environments, both physical and online, to pinpoint the influences supporting a story-based vision of space and function; this is the mode of thematic design. To that end we speculate on thematic design’s contribution to the “spatial turn” in which the world of visual communication further evolves into predominantly a language of environments.