Why the Barbie Dreamhouse Endures

“You’re supposed to be building models, not dollhouses,” I was told my first year in an undergrad architecture studio, where I’d presented a model that was pink, sparkly, covered in bold patterns, and filled with tiny furniture crafted out of chipboard. A few years later, I was at my final pin-up during my first year as an interior design grad student at Parsons. “Don’t build a dollhouse,” the critic said, looking at another one of my models. I later learned that she was an architect who described her specialization as “designing for men.”What a joke, I thought,the whole world is designed for men.

But what was so bad about dollhouses, anyway? The fantasy world they offer contains so much potential for imagining new worlds—especially for women. Anew book,Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey,takes this question to heart, and challenges some of the biases I encountered during these critiques. Published byPin–Upand Mattel and edited by Felix Burrichter and Whitney Mallett, the book not only highlights “the feedback loop between pop culture and design history,” as Mallett puts it; it presents the Dreamhouse as a site designed specifically for the single, liberated woman.

Even before the release of this book, it’s been a banner year for Barbie: the Dreamhouse hit its 60th anniversary; theBarbiemovie, directed by Greta Gerwig, is already being teased in trailers ahead of its release next summer; the paint brandBackdrophas debuted a line of Dreamhouse-inspired shades; and on TikTok, “Barbiecore” has been one of 2022’s biggest trends. What is it, exactly, about Barbie’s Dreamhouse that invites this level of buzz?

“芭比的第一dreamhousewas a statement of independence,” the editors write in the book. Designed in 1962, three years after the doll made her debut, the cardboard house was a portable, foldable bachelorette pad filled with books and modernist furniture reminiscent of designs from Florence Knoll, Herman Miller, and Charles and Ray Eames. Significantly, the home featured no pink andno kitchen, implying that Barbie was not just a housewife, but an independent woman with her own property at a time when women weren’t even legally permitted to obtain a mortgage without a male cosigner. But the home still met one important convention, the editors write: “Her narrow single bed makes it clear that Ken was certainly not sleeping over.”

As architecture historian Beatriz Colomina points out in her contribution to thebook, the midcentury era was a time when architects and consumers alike were infatuated with an idea of “playing house,” from the Case Study Houses in California to MoMa’sHouses in the Gardento the Eameses’ modern toy houses. At the same time, there was a playful attitude cushioned by the construct of the nuclear family, and their subsequent nuclear anxieties. Even Victorian dollhouses—which functioned more as status symbols and displays of taste than as children’s play objects—reproduced nuclear housing. Barbie was never intended to marry or have kids. In fact, Barbie’s independence is preserved so much that if you find baby stuff in one of her homes, it’s almost always related to a storyline of another doll.

InBarbie Dreamhouse, Burrichter and Mallett go on to feature four more versions of the home from the 1970s to today; a Q&A with Kim Culmone, Mattel’s senior vice president of design; and 18 testimonials from architects and critics, including Nile Greenberg, AD100 designerRafael de Cárdenas, and AD100 Hall of FamerKelly Wearstler. As the book points out, much of 20th-century design history can be traced through close readings of the various Dreamhouses. “The Barbie Dreamhouse may be the ultimate gauge to notate a contemporary style,” Michael Abel, architect and principal at ANY, writes in the book. “Is she copying the hyper-pop Post-Modernists or are they copying Barbie?”

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Culmone notes that the Barbie Dreamhouse has always been a reflection of the current culture, all the while maintaining aspirational status. 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’sA-Framecraze; the hyperfeminine 1990 Magical Mansion is pure PoMo historicism painted in pink; and the Barbie Dreamhouse 2000 clearly signals the rise of the McMansion. “We take inspiration from everywhere,” says Culmone. “The perfect juxtaposition is when relatability meets hyperreality. So somewhat relatable, but still through a fantastical, aspirational, hyperreal lens.”

Since its inception, Barbie has pushed the limits of relatability, evolving with the times to become one of the more inclusive doll brands on the market. For the Barbie Dreamhouse, it’s impossible to lose sight of the user, whether that’s the doll herself or the children who simultaneously look up to her while orchestrating her life. Despite Mattel taking almost 20 years to introduce a Black Barbie, the doll now includes 35 skin tones (including those with the skin condition vitiligo), 94 hairstyles, and 9 body types that display various access needs, ranging from hearing aids to prosthetics to wheelchairs. But what does this growing representation mean for the doll’s interiors? While Becky, the first doll in a wheelchair, was released in 1997—seven years after the introduction of theAmericans with Disabilities Act—Barbie Dreamhouses remained inaccessible until the 2020 Dreamhouse, when it added a wheelchair-friendly elevator.

While the Dreamhouse was an “aspirational feminine power fantasy” (to borrow fromElle Decor’s Camille Okhio, whose writing also appears in the book), in many ways the house is equipped to move far beyond the domestic performances of gender, despite implying them in other ways. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Barbie feet.) Just as the development of Becky eventually led to an ADA-accessible home, what design shifts will follow, say, after the 2019 introduction of a gender-neutral doll, or 2021’s first trans femme Barbie, modeled after拉维恩考克斯?

While the book certainly doesn’t attempt to provide an exhaustive look at some of these big questions or the history of inclusive design at Mattel, it concisely highlights the power in expressing individual subjectivity, fantasies, and desires through decor. This is apparent in the very design of the book, which features interiors and objects rather than Barbie herself.

Colomina比作Dreamhouse电视:“It’s a performance of domestic life for a public audience,” she writes. “In that way, Barbie has been Instagram-ready since 1962.” Indeed, these ideas have been augmented in digital spaces, perhaps going back to Mattel’s first Barbie Magical House computer game in 1994. In our current digital culture of 3D rendering, virtual reality, and the metaverse, anyone can theoretically design and occupy their own dream home, even if it’s just through a screen.

“Our perspective is informed by where we stand today, looking back on six decades of the Dreamhouse at a moment whenBarbiecorehas never been so mainstream and gender never more a form of drag,home ownershipnever less unattainable, and domesticity never before so performative,” the editors write. Most of all, the book affirms that the Dreamhouse will continue to trace our culture’s current fascinations and predicaments through toys, fashion, and interior design. As a stage for reflecting the present and imagining new futures, the Barbie Dreamhouse will live on.