Dingbat (building)
A dingbat is a type of apartment building that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular variation of shoebox style "stucco boxes".
[1] They remain widely in use today as “bastions of affordable shelter.”[2] The dingbat, like the bungalow court, was a "popular and populist form of housing.
"[3] Mainly found in Southern California, but also in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, and Vancouver, Canada, dingbats vary in cost from inexpensive to high-end.
[4] Since the 1950s they have been the subject of aesthetic interest as examples of Mid-Century modern design and kitsch, since many dingbats have themed names and specialized trim.
He credits the coining to architect Francis Ventre and describes them: ...[Dingbats] are normally a two-story walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over.
In a 1998 Los Angeles Times editorial about the area's evolving standards for development, the birth of the dingbat is retold (as a cautionary tale): "By mid-century, a development-driven southern California was in full stride, paving its bean fields, leveling mountaintops, draining waterways and filling in wetlands...In our rush to build we tolerated monumentally careless and unattractive urban design...Some of it [was] awful—start with the 'dingbat' apartment house, a boxy two-story walk-up with sheltered parking at street level and not one inch of outdoor space.
Because of this a dingbat is generally comparable in construction cost to a large 2-story house, with none of the expensive features required in larger apartment buildings such as elevators, fire suppression systems, and multistory parking garages.
Many are located on cheaper lots found near "locally undesirable land uses" such as sewage plants, power stations, jails or major freeways.
As for their livability, Gary Indiana writes, "A bad idea run amok, these one- or two- (sometimes three-) story stucco shoeboxes that nearly everyone lives in at one time or another in L.A. have an existential emptiness that can be gussied up and dissembled by track lighting and the right sort of throw pillows and furniture, but the spatial insipidity of the dingbat eventually defeats most efforts to turn a 'unit' into 'home,' even when little sparkle lights enliven the façade.
[9][16] Critic Mimi Zeiger said, "[Stucco boxes] wear their accessories—star-shaped wrought iron, carriage lamps, decorative tile, coats-of-arms—like clip-on jewelry.
and others referenced fantasy lifestyles and geographies: tropical paradises (the Caribbean, the Riviera, Hawaii) or stately dwellings of rarefied provenance (villas, castles).
[17] A Los Angeles Times reporter writing about a book devoted to the rediscovery of the dingbat noted, "Grandiose names—manors, arms, chezs, chateaus—abound.
"[20] Dingbats are decried by many urban planners due to their relatively lower densities and large parking areas, which reduces the attractiveness and usefulness of street-level pedestrian space.
[24] Grant argues that the dingbat “can be considered an icon of the 20th century, in all its kitschy glory", and that demolishing the buildings would remove an essential part of Los Angeles history.
[26] In the 1998 film The Slums of Beverly Hills, teenager Viv (Natasha Lyonne) laments that her family is constantly moving from one dingbat to another.
