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

By Aaron Betsky, Barbara Bestor and Judy Fiskin

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954600584

Book preview

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 subject of photographic cataloging efforts, notably by artists Ed Ruscha beginning in the ’60s and Judy Fiskin in the ’80s. In 1965, Ruscha published the artist book Some Los Angeles Apartments. Here he photographed dingbats (among other apartment types) with the same sensibility of a government-salaried surveyor³ or that of the Bechers, the influential photographers who spawned a tradition (the Düsseldorf School of Photography) focused on revealing typologies through a straightforward documentary-style. Ruscha effectively frames the dingbat, previously understood as common kitsch construction, as an artifact and phenomenon worthy of examination.

In her photographic series Fiskin explicitly refers to the technique of cataloging as a defining aspect of her larger artistic project. In a 1988 interview she is already able to look back at her work and speak to the photographic catalog as a method to simultaneously establish typological taxonomies and then showcase their arbitrary nature.⁴ Her Dingbat 1982-1983 series (discussed in Wim de Wit’s essay Behind the Facade: Judy Fiskin’s Dingbat Photographs in section one) both exemplifies and crystallizes her agenda and a larger zeitgeist of the era: serial documentation of the generic as a critique of the logic of postwar production and consumption.

Writer and urban designer John Chase, to whom this book is dedicated, co-wrote one of the few researched histories on dingbat apartments in his essay The Stucco Box, originally published in 1983. In 1995 Chase also wrote about the ongoing photographic project of Lesley Marlene Siegel, Apartment Living Is Great (republished in this volume), which focuses on the decorative signage adorning dingbat apartments. With over 2,300 photographs, Siegel not only documented and categorized signage types and the stories behind their names, she also began collecting the physical signs themselves as a means of preserving fragments of dingbats as they disappeared, often replaced by larger apartment buildings, or those facing demolition after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.⁵ Whereas Ruscha identified the emerging dingbat type in the ’60s, and Fiskin cataloged it as a weathering and aging type by the early ’80s, by the early ’90s Siegel recognized the dingbat’s status as an endangered species.⁶

Clive Piercy, writing in the introduction to his 2003 photographic homage Pretty Vacant: The Los Angeles Dingbat Observed, noted the 450-page book was an attempt to help preserve these fantastic, quirky characters.⁷ While affectionately capturing the various styles and characteristics of dingbats, Pretty Vacant also explicitly documents the often cheap construction and poor maintenance of many of the buildings. Images of bent or missing facade lettering, faded stucco, and peeling wood are matter-of-factly spread throughout the book. Piercy consciously shows the dingbat as a decaying and disappearing building type, with the last few pages of the book showing two phases of The St. Francis apartments being demolished: pictured first in its entirety, The St. Francis is then shown midway through demolition, reduced to forlorn carport posts supporting remnants of the second floor. Regarding his fieldwork, Piercy comments, almost wistfully, I return again and again to the same streets, just to make sure that these old friends of mine are still here…⁸

In 2010, a new and truly bureaucratic version of dingbat cataloging was launched by the City of Los Angeles through SurveyLA, organized by the Department of City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources. Implemented by a number of contracted teams, SurveyLA is part of the city’s efforts to create a comprehensive, state-of-the-art, and balanced historic preservation program,⁹ one that includes a catalog of all of its historical resources, including dingbat apartment buildings, which have now aged into consideration for historic significance. The three points used by SurveyLA to define a dingbat as potentially eligible for historical listing are:

1. Form: a low (two- or three-story) walk-up containing 6-12 apartments.

2. Tuck-under Parking: room for cars to park at grade (often visible from the street) underneath overhanging upper apartments.

3. Decorative facade and signage: including a wide range of modern patterns and motifs as well as eclectic pastiche of stylistic references (from Polynesian Tiki to French mansard).¹⁰

While these basic physical attributes allow us to categorize the most pure of the dingbat species, mutations and hybrids pervade the streetscapes of Los Angeles. In light of this wide variety of subspecies, it is perhaps easier to describe the dingbat in terms of how it functions—by what it does, rather than by what it is. To paraphrase a portion of the Dingbat 2.0 competition brief:

Beyond its role as an alternative to Los Angeles’ traditional single-family planning focus, the dingbat allowed waves of immigrants to arrive in Los Angeles and find their shared piece of paradise. The dingbat offered the illusion of the single-family house minus the mortgage—a consolation prize for the American Dream. The dingbat provided for and embraced:

1.community—Fostered by a (provisional) common space of apartment entryways, the dingbat offered a manageable scale of community living.

2. Privacy—With individual exterior entryways to units rather than interior double-loaded corridors, the dingbat offered the sense of arriving home to a private asylum.

3. Car Culture—The dingbat provides Angelenos an intimate and immediate connection to their preferred mode of transportation. Without burying the car in a shared lot, the dingbat allows inhabitants to lovingly tend to (and trick out) their vehicles.

4. Identity—Although criticized as pastiche, the catalog of tacked-on facades offered an effective means of identifying one’s home; i.e., mine is the pink-tiled Mod one on the left—just past the one with the starbursts.

While the technique of cataloging, used by artists and historians alike, proposes to document a phenomenon through objective techniques, the iconic dingbat seems to operate as a lightning rod for contemporary and often-heated debates touching on the important but contentious territories of aesthetics, historical significance, and urban living conditions. Dingbat 2.0 offers a complex and varied understanding of this building type to help broaden the scope of these important discussions. Dingbat 2.0 hopes to shift the debate from fascination, fetish, or disgust to one of productive instrumentalization: how can the dingbat reveal the larger issues that are at stake in today’s metropolis? Dingbat 2.0 is both a messy panoply of perspectives and aggregate of methods that refuses to coalesce into a single summative assessment; instead of resolving the discussion into a neat package, this book offers the background necessary for a continuing debate over the future of housing as it shapes our urban context.

The dingbat focuses the ire of those who decry the city’s decaying housing stock and the resulting living conditions. Simultaneously, the dingbat has not escaped the nostalgia of midcentury modernism and general preservationist activism. Concurrent with this debate, the dingbat fabric of the city is being razed and replaced by much larger apartment complexes that satisfy the pressures for urban densification, while ignoring many of the defining characteristics of Angeleno life that the dingbat addressed. This forces the question as to whether or not dingbats should be preserved—and if not, what should replace them?

Artifact for Preservation?

Part of the innovation of the dingbat was its speedy and cheap construction. What started as an effective solution to quickly accommodate the postwar population boom in Los Angeles has now left the city covered with large expanses of aging buildings that were never built to last and are often not considered to have good bones worthy of renovation. Faced with apartment buildings drifting out of style (if not already dilapidated), but which rarely seem to merit updating, many dingbat owners unwittingly slip into the role of benign slumlord. In fifty years the dingbat has easily replicated the trajectory of tenement housing in New York. However, unlike those brick or stone buildings (mostly constructed between 1860 and 1930), it is difficult to imagine the dingbat becoming the renovated, gut rehab agent for gentrification found in Brooklyn or the East Village.¹¹ This leaves Los Angeles with the conundrum of what to do with tens of thousands of housing units.

As an incredible example of midcentury modern vernacular, preservationists have increasingly demanded that the dingbat be recognized and added to historical listings. SurveyLA has already identified hundreds of dingbats throughout the city that may be eligible for listing. The Los Angeles Conservancy has worked to preserve the Hayworth Avenue Dingbats in the Hollywood/Fairfax neighborhood. This one-block stretch, almost exclusively populated by dingbats, has been recognized as an exemplary specimen of both the artifact and its proliferation. The Conservancy even suggests to potential investors, You might want to grab one for yourself before it’s too late.¹² As these shoddily-constructed structures become propped up and preserved as part of the museum-city fabric (the preservation constraints of Florence meets the aesthetic of a Hollywood Western Stage-set), will they create neighborhoods with nostalgic character ripe for gentrification?

The issue of preservation becomes even more complicated and pressing given the structural problems inherent in dingbat construction coupled with Southern California’s seismic unpredictability (or rather imminent predictability). Catastrophic failure during an earthquake looks the part: some dingbat upper stories simply pancake-collapse their lower stories—most incriminatingly in the Northridge Earthquake (see the Interlude Dingbats and Earthquakes). This safety issue seems to justify the ire many Angelenos feel toward what are perceived to be death traps, although the perceived extent of this in dingbats (as opposed to other similar apartment buildings) is often exaggerated. In addition to their inclusion in SurveyLA’s cataloging, the dingbat is also being tracked by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, which is identifying soft story wood-framed apartment buildings that need seismic retrofitting.¹³ While the survey is part of a larger consideration of vulnerable buildings in Los Angeles, including insufficiently reinforced concrete structures that are seen as larger threats to loss of life during an earthquake, the dingbat is disproportionately projected as the face of this problem.¹⁴

The debate over how to consider the existing built environment furthers what will be a growing discussion for planning the future of today’s cities, as thinkers such as Rem Koolhaas have recently been pressing for a critical revision of preservationist policies.¹⁵ In Los Angeles, for better or worse, the preservation of the dingbat would certainly limit the large-scale consolidation and development of many neighborhoods. The continued presence of existing dingbats obstinately raises the question of determining an appropriate scale of densification for the city: do we follow the model of infill or teardown?

Crisis Versus Opportunity and the Relevancy of Housing Typology

Los Angeles has been characterized as the epitome of American polycentric urban decentralization and has therefore received intense criticism for all the problems (from ecological to social) associated with sprawl. However, Los Angeles’ particular development pattern has paradoxically produced the most densely populated urban area in the U.S. Even the incredibly high density of Manhattan, when taken together with its surrounding low-density sprawl, is surprisingly less dense overall than the medium-density sprawl of Los Angeles.¹⁶ The dingbat, as the primary agent of medium-density sprawl, has set the module for this implausible feat. However, the current rising costs of both buying homes and renting apartments points to the continued lack of housing in the Los Angeles area. In addition, given the current desire to revise the automobile-dependent lifestyle coupled with a real threat of resource depletion, it seems that Los Angeles (as well as other cities) must continue to densify. The city is at a crossroads, forced to redefine itself through its infrastructure (especially transit and water) as much as its architecture.

While it is clear that densification must take place, it is less clear at what scale this influx of density should be effected. The dingbat was the first and largest wave of densification that moved across the Los Angeles region, replacing single-family houses with multifamily dingbats. As discussed in section one by Dana Cuff in "Subdivision: R1 and the Dingbat," the grain of this densification remained more or less constant—an increase of density within the lot—while the lot size remained constant, maintaining the appearance of single-family dwellings in an idyllic landscape. Los Angeles’ mandate to densify existing neighborhoods coupled with a desire to maintain an ethos of open-ended individualism—to update the original suburban model—will be shared by many cities in America and across the globe. It is unclear whether Los Angeles will define a new global trend or if more innovative cities will play this role. It is, however, clear that the debate over housing, and therefore the dingbat, has much to offer in this moment of urban transformation.

While the historic cities of Paris, London, and Amsterdam have depended on housing to shape urban form and experience, the great urban plans of modern American cities like Chicago and New York have instead relied on commercial (office) and civic construction to define the city. But as the real estate market has shifted, privately funded multifamily housing (along with retail) has proven to be one of the most reliable ways of reshaping the city. Housing, instead of being confined to the outlying suburban peripheries of the city, has become the stuff of the new metropolis. Around the world, city officials are rushing to corral the flow of capital and shape it into their new urban utopia. Architects such as Bjarke Ingels of BIG in Copenhagen and MVRDV in Rotterdam (both offshoots of Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture) have stepped in to meet this demand, sculpting large masses of residential square footage into volumetric urban icons and spaces.¹⁷ While other building types (museums, cultural centers, infrastructure) clearly captivate the imagination of architects and the general public, the identity of the contemporary global metropolis seems now, more than ever, tied to the architecture of housing. The dingbat, for its own set of typological strategies within housing as well as its provocation for what might replace it, points to some of the most pressing issues for urbanism at this moment.

Urban planners in Los Angeles are now experimenting with different strategies for densification. Updates to the Los Angeles zoning and building codes, such as the Small Lot Ordinance,¹⁸ reflect a larger trend both in the American metropolis and abroad. As housing development becomes a dominant mode of shaping the city, municipalities are quickly changing the experience of the city through these fine grain interventions. In 2014 Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called for an increase of 100,000 new housing units by the year 2021. An article in the Los Angeles Times discussing Garcetti’s goal cited the need for the city to employ diverse strategies to achieve this, considering not only the Small Lot Ordinance, which has grown into a popular development strategy for small-scale developers, but also the Backyard Homes project under development by UCLA’s cityLAB (also discussed in this volume by Dana Cuff).¹⁹ Both strategies follow in the footsteps of the dingbat as a model for small-scale incremental densification, and the winning project from the Dingbat 2.0 design competition, Microparcelization, proposed the application of the Small Lot Ordinance as the solution for strategically replacing dingbat apartments over time.

In sum, the dingbat, perhaps more than any other building type, straddles the line between small-scale entrepreneurial drive and the anonymous power of invisible building codes and market forces. The dingbat occupied a moment (and scale) between vernacular DIY construction (home owners building their own houses) and large-scale speculative development of consolidated capitalism. At a time when cities are increasingly looking to find ways to empower citizens to upgrade their own neighborhoods (and un-shoulder municipal expenses and inefficiencies in doing the same), the dingbat model potentially offers a viable happy medium between the consistency of the American suburb and the nimbleness of unregulated/ informal small-scale residential construction. Unlike large-scale developer-driven projects or public-private partnerships, dingbat development provides a model for a potential city shaped by centralized regulation yet funded by small-scale amateur developers of multifamily projects. Because the dingbat was always a direct manifestation of the forces of development, the debate over its past and future integrates economic considerations inherent in all housing developments that are often glossed over in favor of discussions of style.

The Dingbat and Vernacular Modernism

Vernacular housing is a particularly potent filter through which to investigate a contemporary city. These structures seem to diffuse the sensibility of their specific locales even though they may not appear on postcards or in guidebooks. While the brownstones of Brooklyn, the shotgun houses of New Orleans, and two-flats of Chicago are all considered to be a part of the historic fabric of their respective cities, the dingbat arrives during the postwar era, after the advent of modernism, after urban renewal, and embeds itself into a different consciousness of urbanity. Our interest in the dingbat follows that of a recent history of artists, architects, and historians who attempted to document and understand the contemporary city as it is constructed around this housing type as exemplary of Los Angeles vernacular.

In 1968, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour engaged their students from Yale’s architecture program in one of the first earnest investigations of vernacular architecture since the advent of modern architecture. This research would later be published as Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form and would become a touchstone for architects and urbanists eager to theorize qualities of the contemporary city that were emerging outside of the control of modernist doctrine. Here they coined the term decorated shed, based on Las Vegas’ infamous vernacular building type (nondescript casinos identified only by the giant billboards in front). The concept of the decorated shed would signal a postmodern architecture based on the dialectic of functional volumes sheathed in surfaces of semiotics. As the architecture discipline in the beginning of the twenty-first century shifts its attention from geometric exploration once more back to historical reference (see Barbara Bestor’s essay Deeply Superficial), the dingbat demonstrates its continued relevance in this debate between the modern and the postmodern.

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s analysis of vernacular modernism is most commonly remembered as the famous decorated shed diagram and its association with an academic focus on the semiotics of architecture. However, their interest in constructing a logic to the vernacular was deeper than the facade-ism for which it is remembered. The dingbat, too, has much to teach us beyond its blatant manifestation of the decorated shed. Dingbat 2.0 follows the trajectory of Learning from Las Vegas, claiming that a thorough examination of the dingbat type could offer insight into the impact of dingbats on the city they carpet, and by extension, how re-imagining housing typologies might influence the re-definition of cities across the globe. The dingbat offers an examination of the aspirations of modernism as they played out in the crass expediency of postwar America. Could the ways in which the modern agenda frayed (or frolicked) in the dingbat offer the best insight into the origins of the post-modern; its self-consciousness, its conflation of the heady high art world and the commercialism of pop? The dingbat becomes an instantiation of modernism on the front lines—the ideals of the modern project confronted (and consumed) by realities (cultural, material, and economic) that cared little for ideology. Although typology and vernacular seemed to have both slipped outside of contemporary architectural academic discourse, the dingbat