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Monday Morning Quarterback
(Monday, October 28, 2024)
Every region has its own unique architectural style. You’ve probably seen (or heard) about Classical, Pueblo, Colonial, Spanish, Greek Revival, Federal, Georgian, Gothic, Victorian, Modern, etc, etc. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. More importantly, did you know that Southern California has its own distinctive architectural style? Well, you’re looking at it at the top (and bottom) of this week’s Quarterback. It’s called “Dingbat” and if you look you’ll see it all over Los Angeles County. A dingbat is a type of apartment building that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular variation of shoebox style "stucco boxes." Dingbats are boxy, two or three-story apartment buildings with overhangs sheltering street-front parking. They remain widely in use today as “bastions of affordable shelter.” Mainly found in Southern California, dingbats vary in cost from inexpensive to high-end. Some replaced more distinctive but less profitable building structures, such as single-family homes. 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. Dingbats are normally a two-story walk-up apartment-block developed over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stucco over. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars. Dingbat refers to the stylistic star-shaped decorations, reminiscent of typographic dingbats, that often garnish the stucco façades. These flourishes and other ornamental elements reflect the contemporary but more complex Googie architecture. Dingbats are generally designed to be built on a single, standard residential lot, and use the same types of materials and construction techniques as single-family house construction. 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 multi-story parking garages. From a structural engineering perspective, the "tuck-under parking" arrangement may create a soft story if the residential levels are supported on slender columns without sufficient shear walls in the parking level. The danger is that soft story buildings are known to collapse during an earthquake. The columns used to hold up dingbat-style soft-story buildings have been identified as vulnerable to collapse during earthquakes. As a result, many cities, including Los Angeles, have required owners of soft-story buildings to retrofit them with additional reinforcement. In other real estate news, let’s under the hood…
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