This is the pink wildcard for year’s end. It had never occurred to me that a book concerning Barbie’s lodging could come anywhere close to “not too bad for a present”. It turn’s out, the doll’s houses boast a 60-year course and mirror a surprising wealth of architectural, designing and social references. PIN-UP magazine curated these in a book with a very limited run (already sold out, it clocked at $75, but seems collectible enough to warrant further investigation).
Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey of World’s Best-Selling Dollhouse (PIN-UP)
Why the Barbie Dreamhouse Endures (Architectural Digest)
The stories linked above outline 6 houses (1962, 1974, 1979, 1990, 2000 & 2021), sprinkled with quotes from curators, designers and critics. The houses are toys, not jokes. Τhis quote in particular (which I also used in the title of this piece), by Ian Volner, stands out for me. I guess this “whisper”, this “second sight”, is what turns even a simple building or room to something “more”.
Any individual Barbie house is not so much a building in miniature as it is a compilation of half-understood, second-order impressions about buildings. It’s the memory of a kitchen in a cartoon, or a breakfast nook in a Sunday supplement; it’s the sashay of a dress down a carpeted stair and the thump of a stereo speaker in a sister’s bedroom. The houses are the ultimate epiphenomena of American childhood.
This, from a senior designer, summarizes the 1974-2000 influences:
The 1974 Barbie Townhouse recalls Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino housing typology filled with psychedelic cardboard backdrops in paisley and floral; the 1979 Dreamhouse reflects the era’s A-Frame craze; the hyperfeminine 1990 Magical Mansion is pure PoMo historicism painted in pink; and the Barbie Dreamhouse 2000 clearly signals the rise of the McMansion.
To my gusto, the showcase devolved as the decades passed. My nods of apprehension for the first 2 decades turned to squinting and disappointment for 1990-2000, and the 2021 version (with all its “inclusiveness” paraphernalia) is iffy at best.
The rule of mushy and pastel, when I was a teen at 90s, probably explains why I think of Barbie as just a caricature bimbo (despite her advertised occasional pilot/ doctor/ sports chops), which is not exactly the case (her out of this planet body measurements did not help, either). The debut - modernist - house, in 1962, set things on a different level:
Barbie’s first Dreamhouse was a statement of independence. Foldable, portable, entirely in cardboard, here was a vision of a bachelorette pad for a liberated single woman — plenty of books on the shelves and no kitchen in sight.
Gritty. But I liked even more this implication:
[A]n independent woman with her own property at a time when women weren’t even legally permitted to obtain a mortgage without a male cosigner.
The books-to-spoons analogy smoothed out in later editions, but still, the “freewheeling” spirit did not left the building.