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 identity to inhabit the densifying contemporary megalopolis."


"The dingbat grew out of Los Angeles’s rapid postwar expansion period and defined a pervasive vernacular that still weaves through the space of the city’s neighborhoods and the decades of their development. For more than half a century, this idiosyncratic typology has been vilified, praised, studied, and often misunderstood—as much for being ugly and ordinary as for being innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly 'L.A.' As a housing type, the Dingbat has enabled the sprawl for which L.A. is infamous while simultaneously creating a consistency of urban density achieved by few other cities."





ESSAYISTS: Barbara Bestor, Aaron Betsky, James Black, Dana Cuff , Judy Fiskin (photo essay), Thurman Grant, John Kaliski, Joshua G. Stein, John Southern, Steven Treffers, Wim de Wit;  Co-edited by Thurman Grant & Joshua G. Stein

DINGBAT 2.0 COMPETITION JURY: Barbara Bestor, John Chase, Teddy Cruz, Dana Cuff, Neil Denari, Joshua Prince-Ramus

PANEL DISCUSSION - DINGBAT AS URBAN TYPOLOGY: John Chase, Alan Loomis, Roger Sherman, Mott Smith, Francie Stefan (Moderator) 

PANEL DISCUSSION - DINGBAT AS CULTURAL ICON: Barbara Bestor, Christopher Hawthorne, Alan Hess, Michael Osman (Moderator), Mimi Zeiger

For further reading, click here.

Images via Dingbat 2.0 Kickstarter