- | 8:00 am
Here’s what famous landmarks look like as Barbie Dreamhouses, according to AI
Marketing agency Jellyfish used Midjourney to imagine what the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House would look like if Barbie moved in.
What would Buckingham Palace look like if Barbie moved in? And what would the Pharaohs think if the Giza pyramids became a fuschia pink vacation home? You’ve probably never asked yourself these questions before, but here are the answers, anyway.
Marketing agency Jellyfish has used the generative AI program Midjourney to reimagine 13 landmarks around the world as surreal Barbie Dreamhouses. The Chrysler Building, naturally rendered in pink, is framed by a sumptuous atrium with a garage that is oddly reminiscent of a villain’s lair. The Space Needle appears much shorter and is wrapped in a donut-shaped, three-story apartment with a rooftop terrace. And the plaza in front of the Sydney Opera House has been turned into an oval pool—because “Barbie has to have a pool,” says Emma Rose, design director at Jellyfish.
As one might expect from a marketing agency, the project is a marketing campaign for ConservatoryLand, which designs and manufactures conservatories in the U.K. Rose says that one of the client’s core audiences is families, and many conservatories are being transformed into playrooms. “We wanted to create a fun story which encompasses playroom energy and leans into the unstoppable Barbie phenomenon taking the world by storm,” she says.
Barbiecore isn’t the only thing taking the world by storm. AI-generated images are too. Rose says the prompt “Barbie Dreamhouse style” did a lot of the heavy lifting, though she had to experiment with various other words and styles. To get the color right, she referenced Wes Anderson. For a postmodern touch and unusual building shapes, she mentioned Robert Venturi and Bernard Tschumi. And to round out the aesthetic, she sometimes added “art moderne,” “minimalism,” or “fairy key”— an ’80s Japanese-fashion style characterized by pastel colors and cutesy accessories
For the Eiffel Tower image, Rose started with the prompt, “a photograph of the Eiffel Tower,” followed by “a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in the style of Wes Anderson and Robert Venturi”; and finally, “a still from a Wes Anderson movie of the Eiffel Tower in Barbie Dreamhouse style.” She says Midjourney kept adding staircases that came to an abrupt end midair, and says that when she was pleased with the overall look, she just used Photoshop to remove the extra staircase—and voilà: a fashionable French home to rival Barbie’s Malibu palace.
Rose says she could’ve illustrated all the images herself, but it would’ve taken an exorbitant amount of time to get through them all. Instead, the entire marketing campaign, including generating, remixing, and selecting the best images, took around a day. “It seems like the whole world is talking about Gen AI at the moment, so we wanted to test out what it can do and how it interprets some of the prompts,” she says. “Midjourney is one of the best image-generation tools out there, and the recent updates have made it so good for fun projects like this.”
The only question is: Which Dreamhouse would Barbie choose?