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 design: Jessica Fleischmann/still room.

Co-editor Thurman Grant is a Los Angeles based architect and educator (thurmangrant.com). He is a faculty member of the Interior Architecture Department at the Woodbury University School of Architecture, and through the university has taught in related programs in China and Italy. Grant has contributed to a long list of built residential, commercial, institutional and urban design projects, as well as award-winning design competitions in the U.S. and Asia. In 2011 he partnered with artist Olivia Booth on the installation Schindler Lab, Round One at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Grant is a former president of the LA Forum Board of Directors and was a project leader for the Dingbat 2.0 competition and exhibition.

Co-editor Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft (radical-craft.com), a Los Angeles-based studio that advances design saturated in history (from archaeology to craft) and inflects the production of contemporary urban spaces and artifacts, evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. He has taught at the California College of the Arts, Cornell University, SCI-Arc, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He was a 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, and is currently Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University. He is also a former member of the LA Forum Board of Directors and was a project leader for the Dingbat 2.0 competition and exhibition.