Themesters: inauthentic architecture in Renaissance Italy and today
A short walk down Via de' Cerchi, past the replica of Michelangelo's David and the vendors selling miniature reproductions of the statue, the narrow medieval lane in the historic centre of Florence opens into a small piazza. Forming one side of the square is La Casa di Dante: Dante Alighieri's house. On this spot and in the surrounding alleys, Dante sought inspiration for his Divine Comedy and debated Florentine politics with other citizens of the emerging city-state. Even today with tourists crowding the streets, the neighbourhood exudes an intimate aura of authentic history.
Though few guidebooks mention it and city officials are loath to admit it, Dante Alighieri never lived at La Casa di Dante. Looking for all the world like a weathered medieval palazzo, "Dante's House" was largely constructed less than a century ago, after the city decided a proper monument and mecca for il Sommo Poeta was needed.
---For many, the story of themed architecture begins in an orange grove in the early 1950s, when Walt Disney began construction of his first Magic Kingdom. The new pleasure park was designed, decorated, and landscaped to resemble a variety of nostalgic and exotic locales. Behind the detailed facades, industrial buildings housed shops, restaurants, and rides. Astute visitors to Disney's Haunted Mansion, for instance, may realize that the ride itself takes place in an unadorned steel structure hidden behind the brooding antebellum manor. Robert Venturi, pioneer of the postmodern movement in architecture, coined the term decorated sheds to describe this emerging type of architecture: anonymous warehouses sporting false fronts and immersively-decorated interiors.
By creating unmistakably simulated environments, Disneyland is only the most transparent manifestation of the widespread trend toward themed architecture. All visitors to Disneyland (or at least those above a certain age) realize that the crumbling Mayan temples and sun-baked mesas are concrete and steel evocations of locations elsewhere. Beyond theme parks, we encounter themed architecture in malls built to emulate old-world villages, in tony neighbourhoods where Spanish-style monster homes sit beside Tudor mansions, and in the dark wood and polished brass of the ubiquitous Irish pub. The division between real and fake architecture is more complex and its lineage more extensive than the fantasy worlds at Disneyland suggest. As Dante's House demonstrates, architecture designed to masquerade as something else is not solely a product of the postmodern era that made it intellectually acceptable.
If themed architecture is fast becoming ubiquitous, where does the dividing line lie between real and fake? If it depends on a structure's stylistic inspiration, then all appropriated and resurrected architectural styles, from Neoclassicism to Gothic Revival, must be considered as 'themed' since they evoke a location or emotion beyond the immediate context and function of the building.
If the definition relies on the relation of the construction materials to their function, only structures built in strict adherence to the schools of architecture which advocate truth of materials would be exempt. The dictum 'form follows function' would set apart pure modernist architecture as the only contemporary style resistant to theming. Even the architects of early skyscrapers, who hid steel weight-bearing frames behind shrouds of masonry, sought to disguise a building's true character.
The same practice of facadism could be found even in Renaissance Italy. A few minutes' walk to the north-west of Dante's house in Florence leads to the San Lorenzo neighbourhood and its church, one of the city's largest. What immediately sets the church of San Lorenzo apart from its counterparts throughout Florence is its unfinished exterior. Built in the midst of the Italian Renaissance and designed by visionary architect Filippo Brunelleschi, the exterior was left as a rough stone blank. Though decades later, none other than Michelangelo proposed a neoclassical design for the facade, the church remains without one to this day. As they glance at the unclad church of San Lorenzo, past and present citizens of Florence must innately understand Venturi's concept of the decorated shed. The contrast between the rational clarity of Brunelleschi's interior and the Baroque theatricality of Michelangelo's proposed exterior facade mirrors the opposition between the refined clarity of modernist architecture and the neo-Baroque simulacra of postmodernism.
Beyond the decisions of the architect, a buildings' context must also be considered when developing a definition for themed architecture. A particular structure may be considered authentic in one location and ersatz in another. Buildings constructed in the vernacular - using local materials and traditional techniques to address local needs - are not considered to be themed, but in instant cities such as Dubai, the almost total lack of architectural precedent means total freedom to establish a context that future architects must obey or reject. In these places, themed architecture is the vernacular and neighbourhoods of 'traditional' stone and mud buildings become themed enclaves.
Perhaps our surroundings have become saturated with themed architecture so as to make the distinction meaningless. Searching for a dividing line between themed and unthemed today may be irrelevant. In many ways, the roles of themed and unthemed architecture have been reversed: in a sentiment reportedly echoed by Walt Disney himself, French philosopher Jean Baudillard famously suggested that Disneyland is real while the surrounding megacity of Los Angeles is the "hyperreal" simulation. Baudillard points to a deeper insight than even he intended: unlike the freeways, motels, and power shopping centres beyond the park's gates, the cinematic environments of Disneyland illustrate commonly-felt truths: that history constitutes equal parts quaint fantasyland and exotic adventureland, and the future still holds the promise of a better life in a shining tomorrowland. That Disneyland makes these societal truths manifest in a way that the suburban landscapes beyond the park's berm do not speak to the fact that Disneyland is real in a way that the rest of California can never be. The primary message of Disneyland's architecture is one of reassurance. All themed environments, whether dating from the Renaissance or newly built, are active primarily on an emotional level. They are places where our insecurities are met and our beliefs renewed. And when this landscape becomes suffocating, we can always walk down Main Street and out the gates.