Here are some cases that might clarify the notion of a theme:
(1) The EU offers people financial support for keeping a region's typical trees in their fields, in order to maintain traditional landscapes. Is this theming? Most likely these items from a once more pervasive landscape are integrated into ongoing life in a way that provides a sense of historical density rather than theming. The result could be theming, but only if the everyday life of the region ignored the relics, or treated them as references to a landscape unity perceived as "past" and separated from today's life.
(2) A themed place needs a unity of meaning to refer to, and there are many new kinds of unity nowadays. These new unities are part of everyday life, not themed contrasts with that life. Suburban strips, for instance, are samples or examples of new unities, not themes of those unities. They may in addition be themed Italian or Colonial. Being a sample (or a metonymy or a synecdoche) is not a sufficient condition for being a themed place. In the future, when our current unities have ceased to be the everyday background, then they will be referable to in themed places.
(3) Is a natural history museum a themed place? Think of all those dramatic dioramas with stuffed animals and model people. At the Milwaukee County Museum, a huge hall has been transformed into a rainforest complete with towering plants, dripping water, recorded sounds, and multi-level paths. Yet this is not a themed place, because the focus is on the objects, whether offered in cases or acting in dioramas. A sign of this focus is that the museum guards are not costumed differently in the different halls. The cultural or natural other is being presented as an object for observation and experience from a distance, not for participation in a new environment. Such museum exhibits could become themed places if their grammar began to diverge from the other halls and they changed the expectations for action and self-definition of the guards and participants. In an Irish bar you may hang back and observe, but then you know you are not fulfilling your complete role in the place: you should be loud and jovial. If in the museum you began to give Tarzan cries or swing on the vines you would be hustled out. There, hanging back and observing is the grammatically appropriate role.
(4) What about art museums?
"'Are art museums theme parks for a broad audience?' [Krens] asked at the Armory, 'or are they specialized institutions of research for a very narrow audience?' Faced with these choices, Krens has apparently decided to steer the Guggenheim in the direction of the former. In Krens' view, the museum as an institution is an eighteenth-century idea in a nineteenth-century box that has outlived its usefulness. As architectural historian Victoria Newhouse observes in her insightful 1998 book Towards a New Museum, art museums were originally thought of as educational institutions that served the public good. Subsidized by robber barons and supported by municipalities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and similar Neo-Classical stone piles in major cities across the country set out to amass artworks that could be used to recount the history of art from ancient Egypt to the present. But museums today are expected to do more: They must sing for their suppers, either as money-making enterprises or institutions that fuel surrounding economic development. Over time, the ornate design of cathedrals led many worshipers to feel acutely alienated from the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation that followed fostered an architectural backlash as well as a spiritual one, producing a spare style that rejected ornamentation. If Holl and Moneo's new designs are any indication, we may be about to witness the contemporary reformation of the museum." (Jeffrey Hogafe, "Lost Art," Metroplis, December 1999, 73-5)
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001