Travels in Themed Spaces: Heterotopic Spatial Paradigms of Theme Resorts in the Age of Digitally Augmented Experience

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the pervasion of digital media and the emphasis on experientiality have transformed themed spaces. This research aims to provide insights on the emerging spatialities of themed environments that comprehensively redefine everyday life by unravelling their logics. It seeks to answer the question: What are the characteristics of the themed spaces that support experientially-enriched everyday practices in the age of the pervasion of experience enhanced by digital media? This research explores the background, drivers, and characteristics of the themed hyperrealities using themed resorts as case studies. Theme resorts are experiential realms that comprehensively redefine everyday life of users, providing increasingly abundant materials that respond to their pursuit of richer emotional experience. Theme resorts developed new spatial types that, by implementing digital media technology, have a profound impact on lives and tremendously change experience. Theme resorts are regarded as urban enclosures of spectacle and consumption for the immersivity of its themed spaces, its eminent consumerism and its capacity to respond experimentally to the spatial demand in the age of digital media. To understand how this type represents theming and hyperrealities, this study adopts an interpretivism approach that, through the help of relevant scholars' theories, intends to revise the mainstream concepts and logic of the investigation into this object of study. At the same time, this thesis adopts the case study research method to carry out analysis and clearly explain the views through examples. Based on the findings, this research claims that the existing descriptions of themed spaces can be revised to match the critical evolution that occurred in recent years. By revising the Venturian oppositional dualism that describes representation as crucial component of architectures either structurally embedded (duck) or disjoint (the decorated shed), this thesis submits that contemporary themed architecture introduces new paradigms that expands the Venturian dyad in a nuanced triad composed by simple (duck), twofold (mask/duck, as a revised decorated shed) and probable (quantum duck) representational forms. The theory of heterotopia is used to verify the concepts of research objects and hypotheses. The idea of heterotopia provides capable instruments to explore immersion (otherness) and controlled spectacle (power relations) that constitute the logic underlying the creation of these comprehensive experiential places. The analytical process of this thesis is structured into four parts, which are background overview, study of phenomena, presentation of patterns and conceptual validation. These steps correspond to the contents of the sections of the thesis: the analysis of the characteristics and experience of theming in themed spaces, the exploration of themed spaces from a structural perspective; and finally, the conceptual review of the characteristics and patterns found using the Foucauldian theory of heterotopia. This thesis offers some enlightenment on the cognition, comment, and construction of the architecture of urban enclosures of spectacle and consumption that are increasingly subject to the logics of digitally augmented experience.