Theming Didn't Die. It Got Specific.

The standard account of casino design says theming happened in the 1990s, embarrassed everyone, and stopped. The archive says something more useful: theming never stopped, but what a theme is allowed to refer to changed completely.

The origin, as this magazine tells it

The awards citation in Casino Design Awards 2020 puts a date on it: Jay Sarno literally invented the "new" Las Vegas 20 years ahead of his time, opening Caesars Palace in 1966 and Circus Circus Hotel Casino in 1968, the first two themed casinos in the world. Two buildings, both referring to somewhere else — an empire and a circus.

That is the model the industry later grew out of, and the archive records the exit. Renovation Nation describes a tower where the bones remained, but the designers did away with the quasi-Moroccan theme in favor of a handsome, streamlined Art Deco look. Note what replaced it: not the absence of a theme, but a theme with an actual relationship to the building's period.

Where theming went instead

1. Into culture the owner owns. The strongest themed work in the recent issues is tribal, because the reference is not borrowed. Telling A Story describes an entrance that is an abstract form of an eagle about to take off, and notes that eagles are very potent symbols to almost all Indian tribes. Building an Enterprise carries the wind — a strong element in Navajo culture — through the exterior, the chandeliers, the carpet patterns and the ceiling elements. This is theming with a rights-holder, and it reads differently for exactly that reason. See designing for a tribal owner.

2. Into the market the property serves. Shooting for the Stars describes the "Asian-centric" theme of the property as designed to appeal to Macau's largest customer base, the Chinese and other Asian cultures. That is theming as segmentation, and it is a commercial argument rather than an aesthetic one.

3. Into the fabric of the existing building. Adaptive reuse produces theme automatically. Let It Rock records a design team passionate about preserving and enhancing the original neoclassical and Art Deco style of this building inside and out — a theme nobody had to invent, because the building already had one.

4. Into licensed brand. It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere covers the first stand-alone Margaritaville casino, Jimmy Buffett's laid-back casino theme, in Biloxi. Brand theming is the direct descendant of the Sarno model, with the difference that the reference is a living business with its own standards manual.

The quiet kind, which is most of it

The most interesting theming in the archive is the kind guests never consciously register. Oaklawn, in Spurred to Success: Not many people pick up on it, but the floor pattern of the casino includes an abstract theme, a series of galloping horses. The same story says the property deliberately kept the racing references subtle — subtle references can be found by anyone who looks for them.

That is the modern default. The theme is carried by pattern, material and light rather than by scenery, which means it survives a refresh, does not date as fast, and does not have to be maintained as a set. It also costs less: as The $50 Million Budget observes about renovation generally, changing carpet and ceiling is far cheaper than changing floor area — and carpet and ceiling are precisely where the abstract theme lives. See what the carpet pattern is doing.

Theming as a service line

One more piece of evidence that it did not go away: firms still sell it by name. Always Ahead of the Curve lists Thalden-Boyd-Emery's services as architecture, engineering, interior design, theming and master planning. Theming sits on the same line as engineering. That is not a discipline in retreat.

The test that separates the two eras

Ask what the theme refers to, and who can verify it. A 1990s theme referred to a place the guest had probably never been, and nobody could be wrong about it. A current theme refers to the owner's culture, the property's market, the building's own history or a licensed brand — and in every one of those cases somebody can tell you that you got it wrong. That constraint is the whole improvement.

The archive's coverage is indexed at Design Index: themed design.