Edited by: Riccardo Del Fabbro – Architecture Department Editor – riccardo.delfabbro@positive-magazine.com
Proofreading: Bianca Baroni
Photos: Giulia Bonisoli
Where: Berlin, Germany
Artworks: “DREAMhouse EXPERIENCE: intellect’s child exploitation”
Assembly line.
Automation that establish weird cultural traditions.
Intellect’s child exploitation.
Everything seems to lead to the industrial Fordism’s idea, but instead of being a repetitive way of working, it seems to be a repetitive and bizarre way of worshiping a figure that probably doesn’t make sense to exist.
Assembly line: the growth and the ideals are created through a reminiscent patina of a fairy tale, a kind of mold, which helps to accumulate at a very later time an economic advantage against the “patina”.
This article is dedicated to “the Barbie DREAMhouse EXPERIENCE”: the “patina”.
“DREAMhouse” and “EXPERIENCE” are equally strong and frightening words to describe a complete media dictatorship form, even more serious since it’s linked to the world of children.
Frightening words even for “adults”.
All this at an anthropological level.
In architectural terms, things change.
We are facing an incredibly interesting example of own goal.
Well. Step by step.
This house of horrors is located a few steps from Alexanderplatz, next to well known shopping mall (oddly) and from mid-May is one of the main attractions for the young audience of the German capital.
As I pointed out above, not surprisingly this palace of kitsch is smartly located next to a shopping center, and in the urban tissue it acts as an appendix, in fact as soon as a shopping mall’s client ends the apnea due to shopping, a visit to the world of barbie is the simple culmination of an afternoon that “went well”.
This pink villa is exceptional.
It represents the American Dream that lands in Europe (a “few years ago” American Dream), a villa that has nothing to envy to those of Bel Air, white columns, many white columns without a non-style, if not the wrong one.
An example of POST-POST-POST modern architecture, a pompous villa but decomposable, a shaped high heels fountain with no water, fake grass handkerchiefs, gravel made of plastic.
The whole is bordered by barriers of steel, those that can be found on a construction sites, with hanging the posters of the beautiful blonde made in the USA, almost to preserve the cultural climate of the beautiful “DREAMhouse” from the Berlin context.
Fortunately, the context plays a fundamental part .
Because it is pretty evident.
The bare and damaged residential buildings in the area, the same that in an architectural situation of “normality” would be severely criticized, fortunately contextualize this joke in bad taste, making for those who realize this, a “JOKEhouse EXPERIENCE”.
The shades “off-white” in these spacious buildings contrast beautifully the Barbie’s house in order to create a truely fabrication about history, a contrast hard to imagine.
A contrast that fortunately brings back to reality.
