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Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis
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 Jessica Fleischmann/still room.
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 Jessica Fleischmann/still room.
- GenresArchitecture
288 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2022
This book was a spiritual experience for me! I’ve always had a special love for these buildings and their place within architectural design, but this book gave me the vocabulary to make sense of what before were just gut instincts about them. I came out of this book feeling like I had learned a new language. My walks around my favorite San Diego and Los Angeles neighborhoods will never be the same.
November 6, 2022
Ding-ding-ding. The bell has rung for the end of the dingbat. I never knew that these buildings that are peppered throughout LA were given an architectural name.
Like many others, I do not like dingbats yet they seem to have a charm mainly for nostalgic reasons. Although I never lived in one, I've been to many friends who live in them, partied in them, and even slept overnight in them. Those memories stay with me.
But dingbats should be considered temporary structures in the way FEMA sets up tents and temporary living structures during times of crisis (in the case of dingbats, it was due to a housing shortage).
We don't keep thatched mud huts from the 1700s and 1800s because safer and better architecture came around.
Dingbats need to be reimagined, redesigned and renovated for the more modern living conditions in LA that the book discusses especially near the end. Preserving them should be relegated to photos, drawings and stories in books like this.
Like many others, I do not like dingbats yet they seem to have a charm mainly for nostalgic reasons. Although I never lived in one, I've been to many friends who live in them, partied in them, and even slept overnight in them. Those memories stay with me.
But dingbats should be considered temporary structures in the way FEMA sets up tents and temporary living structures during times of crisis (in the case of dingbats, it was due to a housing shortage).
We don't keep thatched mud huts from the 1700s and 1800s because safer and better architecture came around.
Dingbats need to be reimagined, redesigned and renovated for the more modern living conditions in LA that the book discusses especially near the end. Preserving them should be relegated to photos, drawings and stories in books like this.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews