Archinect - News

On the mystery and magic appeal of LA's iconic visual language

2022-05-19T16:51:00-04:00

The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home.

The LA Times has a really cool new series I am personally obsessed with wherein the “architecture of everyday life” is explored in and around the city. In this iteration, the Times’ style editor Ian Blair waxed poetic about LA’s midcentury typographical elements, best embodied on the facade of Paul Revere Williams’ iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, that are now synonymous with the visual imagination of Southern California feted by David Hockney and so many others.

Image courtesy Joe Wolf via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Blair spoke to the alien nature of the language contained in apartment typeface, commenting on their need to communicate intimations of luxury and class in a way in which words alone become a most effective means of conveying the interiority of space (no matter how illusory).

“Apartment signs affect us because of the amount of effort put into the premise: Please stop, look, come inside, see if you desire to belong here. There’s innuendo baked into the concept; the main selling poi...

Twenty-four years after the Northridge quake, Los Angeles still has thousands of 'soft-story' buildings to retrofit

2018-01-18T14:08:00-05:00

Los Angeles city officials and property owners are making progress on retrofitting the types of apartment buildings that proved especially vulnerable in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. [...] As of this month, retrofits on 608 “soft-story” buildings are complete and another almost 4,000 retrofits are in progress, according to the mayor’s office. More than 13,000 of an estimated 13,500 soft-story buildings have been issued orders to comply, the first step on the road to retrofitting.

Commemorating the 24-year anniversary of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake which devastated the greater Los Angeles area on January 17, Curbed LA reports about the status of LA Mayor Eric Garcetti's effort to retrofit all of the city's 13,500 "soft-story" buildings — like the ubiquitous, and extremely vulnerable, dingbat-style apartment buildings.

Winners of the “Dingbat 2.0" book giveaway

2016-11-30T20:29:00-05:00

In Archinect's latest giveaway, our readers had the chance to win “Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis”. Co-edited by Radical Craft founder Joshua Stein and architect and educator Thurman Grant, the book is the first full-length critical study of the dingbat apartment, the stucco-clad “building code creature” considered to be LA's most ubiquitous and mundane vernacular typology.

The lucky winners are:

Jonathan E.
Erdem T.
Henry M.
Annie L.
Kisha P.

Congrats to all the winners! Thanks to everyone who participated.

You can read more about Dingbat 2.0 on Archinect here.

Win “Dingbat 2.0”, a critical study of L.A.'s most ubiquitous vernacular typology

2016-10-24T12:00:00-04:00

Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis is the first full-length critical study of the dingbat apartment, the stucco-clad boxy “building code creature” that is the Southland's most ubiquitous and mundane vernacular typology. Co-edited by Radical Craft founder Joshua Stein and architect and educator Thurman Grant, the book is the latest initiative in the Dingbat 2.0 project, following the LA Forum's 2010 Dingbat 2.0 competition.

The nearly 300-page publication features essays by figures like Barbara Bestor, Aaron Betsky, Dana Cuff, John Kaliski, the editors themselves, and more. It also includes a Dingbat Field Guide, a fun-to-read section of critical responses and comments from both architects and non-architects, and winning entries of the Dingbat 2.0 competition.

Thanks to DoppelHouse Press, Archinect is giving away five copies to our readers!

Joshua Stein and Thurman Grant took a moment with Archinect to share more details about the book. Read on f...

Nine days left for L.A. Forum's DINGBAT 2.0 Kickstarter campaign

2014-02-07T15:17:00-05:00

With a little over a week left, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design launched their first Kickstarter campaign to support the production and distribution of their upcoming book, DINGBAT 2.0, the first in-depth study of the ubiquitous dingbat apartment -- a common, easy-to-identify structure in Los Angeles that apparently no one talks about.

Co-edited by former L.A. Forum Board of Directors president Thurman Grant and former board member and Radical Craft principal Joshua G. Stein, each section of the book offers a look into its history, future, and value in L.A.'s urban identity. Features include essays, winning entries of the Dingbat 2.0 competition, and panel discussions between some notable figures.

Here's more detail about the book:

"Just as Banham used Los Angeles as a lens through which we could imagine a new form of urbanism emerging across the globe, Dingbat 2.0 uses the dingbat apartment type to explore the seemingly paradoxical potential for individual id...