Dingbat Apartments

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About Dingbat Apartments

Are you intrigued yet disgusted by the domestic architecture of the 1960s and '70s? Then this is the group for you! While we are focusing on documenting these drab yet kitschy buildings in the Los Angeles area, we welcome contributions from any geographic location.

So, what are dingbat apartments?

From Wikipedia: "A dingbat (also called a stucco box or a shoebox), is a type of architecturally undistinguished apartment building that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Dingbats are boxy, two- or three-story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking.[2] The elevation view of a dingbat is "half parking structure, half dumb box."

The buildings were often given names (as a way differentiate one shoebox from another) that were scrawled across the faces of the building in outsize, lavish cursive. Most merely used the name of the street (The Redondo sat on Redondo Avenue, etc.) but many others referenced lifestyles and geographies far removed from the dingbat reality: tropical paradises (the Caribbean, the Riviera, Hawaii) or stately dwellings of rarified provenance (villas, castles).[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat_(building)