Historians in Barbieland
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has entranced movie-goers around the world. Critics and fans have reveled in its wit and wisdom, music and choreography, costumes and sets, and launched a thousand think pieces scrutinizing its cinematic references, technical achievements, and the question of whether, after sixty-four years, the culture is ready to make peace with Mattel’s doll. Here, three historians react to the film and offer their reflections on the real-life houses that inspired the production, why Ken could never be an architect, and Barbie’s right to the city.
Figure 1. Aerial view of Barbieland, modeled on Seaside, Florida, by way of the The Truman Show, whose Seahaven Island was filmed there. Still from Barbie, dir. by Greta Gerwig, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023.
Little Woman
— Alice Friedman
In 1994, the Canadian Center for Architecture invited me to curate an exhibition about gender and building toys, drawing from their recently acquired collection of over three hundred architectural toys and games. Putting together the exhibition and accompanying book, Maisons de rêve, maisons jouets, was both fun and eye opening, not least because the themes of the show quickly jumped off the endless shelves of pristine examples in CCA’s vaults: boys were trained to build things out of wood, metal, and plastic, while girls were provided ready-made, furnished dollhouses to play-act being wives and mothers.
The Barbie movie reminded of this experience, because what really sticks with me all these years later is the fact that the famously formidable director of the CCA, Phyllis Lambert, gave me permission to purchase a large Barbie Dream House for the collection.
What a thrill! As a kid I would never have been allowed to have such an expensive, tacky, hot-pink toy, even if I did still play with Barbie, who burst onto the scene when I was nine. Woman director, woman curator: we never talked about it, but to this day I’m pretty convinced that acquiring a Barbie Dream House for that august, woman-led institution was an example of the sort of “girl power” that Gerwig’s Barbie celebrates. File under “women’s leadership.”
Figure 2. Stereotypical Barbie’s single-family house (second from left) sits on a cul-de-sac. Its design, like those of its neighbors, was inspired by Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs. Still from Barbie, dir. by Greta Gerwig, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023.
There is much to love about the Barbie movie. It’s packed with ideas and in-jokes. I loved its zany pink houses, painted backdrops, and unapologetic feminism. Gerwig treats the built environment the same way she treats existential questions about time and human mortality — the plot centers around Stereotypical Barbie’s quest to figure out why she has begun to think about death and develop cellulite — offering up a warp-speed barrage of images and ideas that challenge viewers.
Stereotypical Barbie lives on a cul-de-sac formed by the dot over the “i” in her name as written out (in pink asphalt, with sparkles) in looping cursive letters; her neighborhood, filled with scaled-down three-story houses occupied by other Barbies, is surrounded by the meandering suburban streets of Barbieland, with a “downtown” of concentric, semi-circular avenues worthy of Ebenezer Howard.
According to production designer Sarah Greenwood, Barbieland’s houses were designed to reflect the cool, Mid-Century Modern look of the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs. But what’s fascinating is that Richard Neutra’s glamorous showpiece has been cannibalized to create tall chimneys of variegated pink fieldstone, and diminutive, stacked boxes with the same vertical baffles that end up being nothing like the original. There’s a pool here too, of course, but Barbie’s architect has ditched Neutra’s turquoise rectangle for a more appropriate kidney shape, accessed by a two-story, spiral slide. The components are all here, but the look is transformed by woman-centered design: another unmistakable act of girl power.
Figure 3. The design of Weird Barbie’s house evokes John Lautner’s Elrod House. Still from Barbie, dir. by Greta Gerwig, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023.
Palm Springs glamour makes an equally brilliant appearance in the hilltop house of Weird Barbie, the wise but damaged (from being played with “too hard”) character who advises Stereotypical Barbie. Weird Barbie’s circular, open-plan command center evokes John Lautner’s Elrod House as featured in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. There, a vicious battle takes place between Bond and “Thumper” and “Bambi,” two scantily-clad women who attack him with choreographed jumps, kicks, and punches; Weird Barbie has a similar way of moving, descending from an upper-level gallery with a cartwheel and vogueing the splits.
Figure 4. Lautner’s house was featured in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever and Weird Barbie’s movements recall that film’s vicious battle between Bond and “Thumper” and “Bambi,” two scantily-clad women who attack him with choreographed jumps, kicks, and punches. Film clip via YouTube.
And there’s much, much more, lots of it arcane, and almost all of it entertaining. Moving between irony, in-joke, and serious philosophizing, offered up on a resplendent fuchsia stage filled with a banquet of architectural delicacies, Gerwig and her team transform a controversial plastic doll and the places she inhabits into something genuinely worth thinking about.
Why There Is No Architect Ken
— Despina Stratigakos
Watching Barbie and the many discontinued Mattel dolls paraded on screen, I was reminded of my own ill-fated attempt to make Ken an architect. It was spring 2007, and I was a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Planning. Michigan voters had recently approved Proposal 2, a ballot measure that banned affirmative action programs at public institutions in that state. The atmosphere on campus was tense as the university, including the college of architecture and planning, assessed how the law would impact diversity among students and faculty and why that diversity mattered. In this polarized climate, the chair of the department of architecture asked me to curate an exhibition on women in the profession. Hoping to get people talking instead of shouting, I came up with the idea of using Barbie to explore gender stereotypes in an overwhelmingly masculine field. But could Barbie actually be a vehicle for confronting patriarchal norms?
Figure 5. Barbie as an architect as imagined by students, faculty, and staff at University of Michigan for a 2007 exhibition curated by Despina Stratigakos. Courtesy Despina Stratigakos.
I began planning for the show by organizing a workshop exploring what Barbie and Ken might be like as architects. (The trademarked version of Architect Barbie did not yet exist.) In preparation, I bought two huge shopping bags full of Barbies and Kens from Toys R Us. On the day of the workshop, I lined up my Barbies and Kens around the room. At the event, architecture students and staff (of all genders) discussed gender bias in architecture and how artists had used Barbie and Ken as tools of feminist critique. The Barbie Liberation Organization, for example, has been making Barbie mayhem for decades, most recently with fake “Eco Warrior” Barbies. At the end, I invited participants to take a Barbie or Ken, whichever they preferred, to fashion into an architect for the exhibition. To my surprise, as I looked around, I realized that all the Barbies were gone but none of the Kens. I packed them up and returned them to the store.
Over the next few weeks, female workshop participants created their architect Barbies. The resulting dolls’ over-the-top Barbieness surprised me: rather than tone down the hyper feminine makeup, hairstyles, dresses, and heels, the participants had gone all in. Their dolls radiated girl power, uncompromising and unafraid in pink. On opening night, as people laughed and played with the dolls, including senior male faculty, I saw architect Barbie work her magic. These dolls would later inspire me and Kelly Hayes McAlonie when we collaborated with Mattel on the development of an official Architect Barbie for its “Barbie I Can Be” series in 2011. (Each year, starting in 2001, the company issued Barbie in a new career.) It is this Architect Barbie who appears at the start of Barbie, the movie, brought to life in the same outfit worn by her 11.5-inch-tall plastic counterpart.
Figure 6. The official Architect Barbie as launched in 2011 in New Orleans, with co-creators Stratigakos Despina (left) and Kelly Hayes McAlonie (right). Courtesy Despina Stratigakos.
Although it was thrilling (and surreal) to see Architect Barbie make her Hollywood debut, it got me thinking about those rejected Kens. Why was Ken not enough? The women who had joined me in imagining Barbie as an architect were dead serious in their play: the doll became an avatar of dreams and frustrations. Although male students and instructors enjoyed making architectural drawings and models — and attended my workshop —, it seems that they did not care to play with dolls or take this play seriously. Perhaps in the masculinist culture of architecture schools, they could not feel their Architect Kenergy. Or maybe they worried that in Architect Barbieland, they would always be number two.
Barbie’s Right to the City
— Matthew Gordon Lasner
Barbie, a film about gender stereotypes, mostly takes place in stereotypically gendered spaces: the houses, cul-de-sacs, and town beach of Barbieland, representing the suburban idyll of women and children, and the high-rise headquarters of Mattel in L.A.’s Century City, representing the male world of the business district.
Figure 7. Century City, a mixed-use “city within a city” on the West Side of L.A. developed by William Zeckendorf and ALCOA in the 1960s on the site of the former backlot of 20th Century Fox, represents the stereotypically male world of the business district — despite the fact that Mattel’s Ruth and Elliot Handler lived in a penthouse in the development’s first apartment complex, Century Towers, designed by I.M. Pei and completed in 1964. Photograph by Chris Martino, 2013. Courtesy Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
This oppositional geography — which Gerwig has employed before, as in Little Women, set in suburban Concord, Mass., and Manhattan — reflects much of the reality of mid-century Southern California from which Barbie emerged, and the lived experience of most of doll's audience. But in rehearsing centuries-old stereotypes about place and identity, commerce and domesticity, production and social reproduction, Gerwig missed an opportunity to advance her critique of patriarchy by placing Barbie where she belongs: in an apartment, in the city.
Until World War II, young, unattached women mostly lived with their parents or in supervised settings like boarding houses and residential hotels. Some, beginning in the late nineteenth century, took their own flats, but propriety frowned upon this. It was also very expensive. Meanwhile, well into the twentieth century many landlords refused to rent to single women, while some cities prohibited unrelated women from living together.
Figure 8. Local builder (and one-time city councilmember and mayor of Hawthorne) Victor Zaccaglin started building stucco-box complexes for young adults in L.A.’s South Bay in late 1950s. The Highland Apartments, in Hawthorne, opened in 1961. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2013.
All this began to change in the late 1950s. And where did it happen first? Hawthorne, California: the headquarters of Mattel. As the center of the nation's booming aerospace industry, L.A.’s South Bay, including Hawthorne, Torrance, Redondo Beach, and El Segundo, saw a huge influx of young, college-educated workers during the Cold War. To house them, local landlords like Hawthorne’s Victor Zaccaglin put up hundreds of small, “stucco box” apartment buildings. Most were organized around a courtyard. Most of those courtyards had swimming pools.
To keep the good times (and rents) rolling, Zaccaglin and other owners began making special efforts to appeal to women. They hired women as resident managers, planted attractive landscaping, added dressing rooms and powder rooms to apartments, and allowed women, who earned much less than men, to double- and triple-up.
Figure 9. At the time of Barbie’s debut, in 1959, young single adults in L.A.’s South Bay, home to Mattel, were migrating to stucco-box apartment complexes, where they built a lively social scene. The South Bay Club in Torrance, designed by Robert H. Skinner and developed by R&B, was among the most elaborate and popular of these complexes when it opened in 1965. Photograph by Don Ornitz, 1967. Courtesy LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, U.S. Library of Congress.
By the time that Mattel launched Barbie, in 1959, the Los Angeles Times was proclaiming these complexes the city’s great "new social outlet.” The formula was so successful that in 1965 another local developer, R&B, built the South Bay Club, in Torrance, the first-ever apartment complex, anywhere, marketed explicitly to singles. The format quickly spread to cities coast-to-coast.
Figure 10. What would the Barbie Dream House, first sold in 1962, have looked like if the doll’s “house” were an apartment complex? Here is what DALL-E, the generative AI tool, rendered, after much trial and error, with the prompt “a hot pink plastic model of a low-rise apartment complex with a swimming pool in the courtyard, from Barbieland.” Image by “Matthew [Gordon Lasner] x DALL-E, Human & AI,” Sept. 10, 2023.
It's in these Space Age dingbats where the Barbies, with their hi-fi sets and sleek furniture, would have lived — not in suburban Barbieland, which Gerwig modeled on Seaside, Florida, the throwback resort from the anxious Eighties that gave rise to the New Urbanism.
Unlike Gerwig, Stereotypical Barbie ultimately rejects spatial stereotypes. She leaves the bright plastic world of Barbieland for the bright plastic world of L.A. But while one might expect to find her in her own real-world dream house, perhaps on a cul-de-sac near her new friend Gloria, I picture her in a pink penthouse with a pool — in Century City, just like her creator, Ruth Handler.
CITATION
Alice T. Friedman, Despina Stratigakos, and Matthew Gordon Lasner, “Historians in Barbieland,” PLATFORM, Sept. 18, 2023
