Field Guide to Dingbats – 1 of 2 - LA Forum

Los Angeles Forum forArchitecture and Urban DesignField Guide toDingbats*

Field Guide to DingbatsINDEX1. Excerpts from Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham - 1 page2. City of Los Angeles Dingbat Preservation Plan (Draft) - 2 pagesAvailable online: http://www.preservation.lacity.org3. “Dingbat Culture”, Mimi Zeiger - 2 pagesOriginally published in READYMADE magazine’s digital preview issue.4. “Apartment Living is Great - Lesley Marlene Siegel”, John Chase - 2 pagesOriginally published in the LA Forum’s 1995 Newsletter ‘Urban Landscapes’.5. “The Stucco Box” - Excerpt from Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving, John Chase - 36 pagesThe Stucco Box, by John Chase (with John Beach) is reproduced with permissionfrom the author and publisher Verso from the book Glitter Stucco and DumpsterDiving. The article was original published in Home Sweet Home: American DomesticVernacular Architecture, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; Rizzoli, in 1983.ADDITIONAL REFERENCESWebsite References:http://begalke.com/tagged/dingbathttp://www.thedingbatproject.com/http://www.outregallery.com/browse.aspx?Category=31 (Leslie Marlene Siegel)http://unusuallife.com/apartment-living-is-so-so-dingbats/ (Leslie Marlene Siegel)Other References:Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner BanhamSome Los Angeles Apartments, Ed RuschaStarving for Embarrassing Architecture, Erik GongrichPretty Vacant: The Los Angeles Dingbat Observed, Clive PiercySlums of Beverly Hills, Tamara Jenkins (Writer & Director)

Reyner BanhamLos Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971Pages 175-177This useful term -- ‘the basic Los Angeles Dingbat’ -- was probably invented by FrancisVentre during the year he taught at UCLA and lived in a prime example of the typewithin handy traffic-roaring distance of the San Diego, and denotes the currentminimal form of multi-family residential unit.It is normally a two storey walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depthof the site, built of wood and stuccoed over. These are the materials that RudolphSchindler and others used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and thedingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitivemodern architecture. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simplerectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxedbalconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars.But out the front, dingbats cannot be left to their own devices; the front is acommercial pitch and a statement about the culture of individualism. A row of dingbatswith standardized neat backs and sides will have every street facade competitivelyindividual, to the extent that it is hard to believe that similar buildings lie behind.Everything that Nathanael West said, in The Day of the Locust, about the fancifulhouses in Pinyon Canyon is true of the styles of the dingbats, except that they areharder to trace back to historical precedents, every style having been through the LosAngeles mincer. Everything is there from Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, fromCod Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to PolynesianGabled and even - in extremity - Modern Architecture.The dingbat, even more that the occasional tower blocks below Hollywood oralong Wilshire, is the true symptom of Los Angeles’ urban Id trying to cope with theunprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within theillusions of homestead living.

text and Polaroids by Mimi Zeiger. . .As I drive up and down the streets between Pico andOlympic boulevard the cliff-hanger hopes of Los Angelesare laid bare to me through its names. Names of neighborhoods,buildings, and streets, but especially of dingbats.That’s why I’m cruising. I’m hunting dingbats on these overexposedstrips—dodging Hasidic Jews on their way to schul andLatino boys zipping in and out of carports on Razor scooters. Theyall live in dingbats. The dingbat is the brick and mortar of themelting pot.“What’s a dingbat?” you ask. It has two meanings: a stupid oreasily confused person, and stupid or easily confused decoration.In L.A., it’s both Pamela Lee and the Pamela Apartments. Flat,windowless facades propped up on spindly legs that taunt theunstable tectonic plates below.Dingbat apartments are built icons of the postwar era. Theirfacades are as much painted lady as any Victorian, but by way ofJoan Crawford, not the Queen Mum. They wear their accessories—star-shaped wrought iron, carriage lamps, decorative tile, coats-ofarms—likeclip-on jewelry. Baubles and broaches designed toemulate a glamour just beyond reach.Then there are the names. Not all dingbats have names, but theones that do announce them in gilded cursive. To distinguish onepastel, insurance-company’s nightmare from the next, midcenturydevelopers chose names invoking social mobility. Plain stuccoapartment buildings were dubbed the Landmark or the Manor. Alandmark of what? A developer’s cheap attempt at a buck executedin pink stucco? Or just a sad attempt to establish some sort ofgrounding in a land where the earth shakes and the pictures move.As I turn onto Sherbourne, “Sherbourne Gardens” scrolls acrossthe screen in sweeping calligraphy, the grandeur of the scriptcompensating for where the architecture comes up short. It’s likethe naming of towns in the great westward migrations that gaveDINGBAT DEFINED: Critic Reyner Banham attributes the term dingbat toarchitect Francis Ventre. Banham wrote the 1971 urban scan Los Angeles:The Architecture of Four Ecologies while himself living in a dingbat.

and good-bye. I’m trying to figure out if it’s welcome to FantasyIsland or a send off for those going further west. When you hit theouter edges of the American continent, names become like koans.I lived in the Pacifica Apartments in Santa Monica for a while.It was a dingbat made tasteful in flat gray and flat blue. Affordableand modest—at the time it was rent-controlled—it wore no nameor ornament on its front side. The only sign of its dingbat-hoodrise to Milan, Tennessee; Morocco, Indiana; and Paris, Texas—European immigrants trying to make a life out of sorry clumps ofdirt. Bootstrapping one’s station in life is, of course, 100 percentAmerican. A three-car pileup of manifest destiny, trailblazingcowpokes, and The Jeffersons.So it seems right that in Los Angeles, where the frontier ends inan irrigated desert ripe with expectancy, the naming of placeswould take hold and flourish with baby-boom abandon. Dingbatscame into their own during the golden age of television andDINGBATS CAME INTO THEIR OWN DURING THE GOLDEN AGE OFTELEVISION AND WERE MODELED AFTER THE LITTLE BOXES THAT KEPT TIMEIN HALF-HOUR SEGMENTS. THEY ARE MINIDRAMAS OF DOMESTICITY.was on the lease agreement and the monthly check I made out tothe Pacifica Real Estate agency. The apartment was comfortableenough, but something was missing: that coulda-been-a-contenderquality spelled out in tin letters and colored lights.For me it’s the sad, faded dignity of the apartment buildingsthat makes this plasticky City of Angels seem like a livable place.A place where names are no longer placeholders for a bettertomorrow, but first editions of the American dream, executed inshades of turquoise and dusty rose.were modeled after the little boxes that kept time in half-hoursegments. They are minidramas of domesticity.I head to Santa Monica, slowing down for the best of themand taking snapshots. A few blocks from the beach, but withoutmuch of a view, I find the Ocean Aire Terrace and the WestWinds. The salty fog rusts their copper signage, but theiroptimism is ineffaceable.There is only one that really throws me: Aloha, emblazonedacross the blankest of blank white stucco, with a star flourish likean asterisk. It’s neither the Aloha, nor the Aloha Winds, nor thestrange but somehow fitting Aloha Manor. It’s simply Aloha. HelloIntrepid girl-reporter Mimi Zeiger is the editor of architecture zine loud paper.