Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis

Description

The first critical study of the ubiquitous and mundane Los Angeles dingbat apartment, featuring critical essays, photography, and international competition winners re-envisioning the dingbat for the 21st century.

Often dismissed as ugly and unremarkable, dingbat apartments have qualities that arguably make them innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly “L.A.” For more than half a century the idiosyncratic dingbat has been largely anonymous, occasionally fetishized and often misunderstood.

Praised and vilified in equal measure, dingbat apartments were a critical enabler of Los Angeles’ rapid postwar urban expansion. While these apartments are known for their variety of midcentury decorated facades, less explored is the way they have contributed to a consistency of urban density achieved by few other twentieth century cities.

Dingbat 2.0 integrates essays and discussions by some of today’s leading architects, urbanists and cultural critics with photographic series, typological analysis, and speculative designs from around the world to propose alternate futures for Los Angeles housing and to consider how qualities of the inarguably flawed housing type can foreground many crucial issues facing global metropolises today.

Published in cooperation with The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Book design: Jessica Fleischmann/still room.

Sujets

• History
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: DoppelHouse Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781954600584
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

Published in cooperation with The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Grant, Thurman, editor. | Stein, Joshua G., editor.
Title: Dingbat 2.0 : the iconic Los Angeles apartment as projection of a metropolis / edited by Thurman Grant and Joshua G. Stein.
Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. | Los Angeles : DoppelHouse Press, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-9832540-5-8 | LCCN 2016933956
Subjects: LCSH Apartment houses—California—Los Angeles. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Buildings, structures, etc. | BISAC ARCHITECTURE / Buildings / Residential | ARCHITECTURE / History / Contemporary (1945-).
Classification: LCC NA7862.L67 .G73 2016 | DDC 728/.314/0979494—dc23
Copyright 2016 DoppelHouse Press
John Chase Dedication, copyright 2010 John Kaliski
“Apartment Living is Great: Lesley Marlene Siegel,”
copyright 1995 John Chase
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher.
Cover illustration: Thurman Grant
Book design: Jessica Fleischmann / still room
Additional image credits listed on pages 266 - 267
Dingbat 2.0
The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis
Edited by Thurman Grant and Joshua G. Stein
For John Leighton Chase
and with gratitude to our families:
Alice, Alman, Manal, Asura, Kenny, Brittany and Sebastian
Jen, Kristine, Harry, Hilary, Santiago and Florentina
In a dream I was driving out west to live in Los Angeles. I pulled into Hollywood off a palm-lined street and tucked my car under an apartment house overhang carport whose front end featured 3-D show-card slash script letters that spelled out “SWANK.” As I looked out my apartment window I could see part of the letter “S” together with the tail-end of my Ford Victoria hardtop convertible. Soft music was coming out of my 45 RPM record player with the sounds of jazz from the Stan Kenton orchestra. A palm frond broke loose and landed in the street. I realized years later that this was my dingbat dream that never came true.
— Ed Ruscha , July 2015
Table of Contents 0.1 Introduction Joshua G. Stein and Thurman Grant 0.2 John Chase, Reyner Banham, Stucco Boxes and Dingbats Thurman Grant 0.3 Dedication: John Chase, 1953–2010 John Kaliski Dingbat 1.1 The Sign of Id: The Dingbat that Conquered Los Angeles Aaron Betsky 1.2 Behind the Facade: Judy Fiskin’s Dingbat Photographs Photographs by Judy Fiskin Text by Wim de Wit 1.3 Deeply Superficial: Excavating the Dingbat from the Art and Architecture Canon Barbara Bestor 1.4 The Embodiment of Speculation and Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Dingbat Apartment Steven A. Treffers 1.5 Subdivision: R1 and the Dingbat Dana Cuff 1.6 The Veneer of Nostalgia: Dingbat Life in Slums of Beverly Hills Joshua G. Stein 1.7 Apartment Living Is Great: Lesley Marlene Siegel Photographs by Lesley Marlene Siegel Text by John Chase Interlude One Dingbat Production Steven A. Treffers Dingbat Diatribes Thurman Grant Field Guide to Dingbats James Black and Thurman Grant 2.0 Defining Dingbats 2.1 Surface & Symbol (and Carports) 2.2 Dingbat Menagerie 2.3 Dingbat Habitats 2.4 Post Dingbats Interlude Two Dingbats and Earthquakes Thurman Grant Micro-Modifications: Stories of Dingbat Dwellers Photographs by Paul Redmond Texts by Joshua G. Stein Dingbat 2.0 3.1 A Critic’s Response John Southern 3.2 Dingbat 2.0 International Design Competition Winning Projects 3.3 Dingbat 2.0 Competition Jury Edited transcript of Jury Deliberations 3.4 Dingbat 2.0: Iconography Selected Projects from the Dingbat 2.0 Competition 3.5 Panel: Dingbat as Cultural Icon Edited Transcript of Panel Discussion 3.6 Dingbat 2.0: Typology Selected Projects from the Dingbat 2.0 Competition 3.7 Panel: Dingbat as Urban Typology Consolidated Comments from Panel Participants Credits and Index Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Image Credits Dingbat 2.0 Contributors Index

0.1 Introduction
The dingbat, even more than the occasional tower blocks below Hollywood or along Wilshire, is the true symptom of Los Angeles’ urban Id trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living. 1
—Reyner Banham
The Dingbat Species
The dingbat apartment blankets the urbanized flatlands of Southern California like the chaparral covering the surrounding rugged hills and valleys. Emerging in the early 1950s this new native species of apartment structures found its niche in the building boom of the late ’50s and ’60s and quickly spread across the fertile expanse of postwar Los Angeles and the American Southwest. The dingbat easily insinuated itself into Los Angeles’ expansive grid of single-family residences, replacing individual homes and taking over entire neighborhoods, subtly, yet profoundly transforming the landscape of the city.
The dingbat is usually a two-story walk-up built of stucco over wood framing with an often extravagantly dolled-up facade—Mansard, Tiki, Mod, anything fantastic or exotic. However, its impact on the built and cultural context of Los Angeles is much more complex and nuanced than the simple structure might suggest. The dingbat is the quintessential Los Angeles apartment building—inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Angelenos who, despite the catchy script on the facade, never realized their apartment type had a name. The dingbat is also quintessentially Los Angeles in its contradictions: provisional yet persistent, pretentious yet mundane, eclectic yet generic, and an agent of both urban density and sprawl.
The dingbat, while a product of the ’50s and ’60s, is so firmly rooted in the ethos of the city that it remains relevant in looking toward the city’s future. Given the degree to which Los Angeles’ development influenced or predicted a global trend in decentralized urban growth, the city’s efforts to densify may well hold valuable lessons for the role that housing plays in the current international wave of city-making, including determining the ideal scale for the grain of new development and questioning the role of the vernacular, the generic, the popular, and the populist.
The Dingbat 2.0 Project
Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartmenet as Projection of a Metropolis is the culmination of a multi-year project by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design to raise critical debate around Los Angeles’ vernacular housing and its repercussions for the city, and for urban development across the globe. Founded in 1987, the LA Forum is an organization that locates itself between academia and practice— attempting to identify and critically address issues that have immediate impact on the larger disciplines of architecture and urbanism through the context of Los Angeles. In 2002, the Forum initiated a critical debate on the emerging phenomenon of “Dead Malls.” While many had noticed the slow creep of boarded-up and abandoned shopping malls, the Forum’s Dead Malls competition focused critical inquiry and reconsideration of the dead mall as both a building type and cultural dilemma. 2 Along similar lines, in 2010, the Forum turned its attention to the dingbat apartment and the larger issue of an aging modern housing stock within the contemporary city. Through an international design competition, exhibition, and series of panel discussions, the Forum engaged architects, historians, critics, planners, and urbanists to discuss the past, present, and future of the dingbat. The topic resonated with the design community and the general public in Los Angeles and beyond, who were eager to debate a building type so iconic and ubiquitous within Los Angeles, yet rarely discussed outside the issues of aesthetics and taste.
Dingbat 2.0 positions the events associated with the 2010 design competition as a platform from which to launch a discussion on the influence of the dingbat in urban planning, cultural iconography, and art and architectural history. The book is divided into three sections. Sections one and two, read in any order, will help build an in-depth understanding of the dingbat. Through a series of short essays, section one reveals the historical forces that gave rise to the dingbat, mining the deep influences and conflicts of economy, zoning, capitalist consumption, technology, democratic ideology, and architectural typology. Examined through the dingbat, these forces are reapplied onto the intimate and public lives of the Angeleno and trace the reactions of the art and architecture disciplines’ relationship to the generic . Section two, “ Field Guide to Dingbats ,” is an examination of the physical qualities and characteristics of the dingbat through text, drawings, and photographs. This guide ensures that the reader has a clear understanding of the physical nature of the dingbat, which is discussed in more abstract terms in the sections that precede and follow it. Focused on projects from the Dingbat 2.0 competition, section three speculates on how architects and planners might reshape the city through its housing and a reconsideration of the dingbat type, while also considering the future of the dingbat and its continued influence on the identity of Los Angeles. Selected competition projects along with jury deliberations and panel discussions reveal the far-reaching, complex, and potentially long-lasting role of the dingbat.
Taking Stock: A Catalog of the Provisional
The impetus for the Dingbat 2.0 project coincides with a certain immediacy to reckon with this particular type of housing whose days seem to be numbered. In a city of rapid development where the built environment is considered expediently constructed and in constant flux, it is easy to inadvertently watch a species disappear. Perhaps because of the fleeting nature of its popular styles, the dingbat quickly became the subjec