Category Archives: Architecture

Teacher Appreciation Week 2023

At my drafting table in 1995. Photo: Angela Pacheco

I wouldn’t be here without public school teachers in the Montebello Unified School District who had my back.

Shout out to Mr. Perez at Montebello High School who taught me the word “meticulous” and trained us little foolios to be #architects.

Shout out to Ms. Georgino at Montebello Intermediate who encouraged my writing on bizarro #futurism in 1989.

Shout out to Ms. Peterson at Washington Elementary who taught me how to #write my very long name which used to have a confusing hyphen.

This is #TeacherAppreciationWeek

Thank a teacher 🍎 ✏️ 🌏 ♥️ 🙏🏽

Thank you, Mike Davis

When I abruptly quit architecture school in 1998 and was depressed and lost but found my way to critical planning practice, the book that got me there was City of Quartz.

Thank you and rest easy, Mike Davis.

We will keep up the fight.

The Dingbat is Dead. Long Live the Dingbat!

dingbat-2-0-cover

You know the Dingbat apartment building even if you don’t know its history. Architecture historian Reyner Banham coined the Dingbat phrase in the 1970s. It’s that clunky stucco box with a quirky facade perched precariously above parking spaces. Maligned by some, revered by many, studied ad infinitum: the Dingbat is distinctively “L.A.” 

The newest scholarship on this typology is the delightful Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis. This book is a meticulous and exhaustive analysis of one of the most misunderstood building types in Los Angeles. I recommend it highly.

The book’s many essays illuminate the Dingbat’s origins, meaning(s), and (possible) future(s). Pictures are plentiful. Diagrams and photo simulations abound. A newly developed Dingbat taxonomy provides a handy guidebook for spotting them in the environment. And whereas prior studies focus almost exclusively on the Dingbat’s unmistakable facade, Dingbat 2.0 ventures to step inside. Residents share what it’s like to live in this particular form of multifamily housing. This new dimension brings us closer to a “complete comprehension” of the Dingbat.

Dingbat 2.0 is a must-read for urbanists, architects, historians, housing advocates, and everyday Angelenos.

Shout out to Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and DoppelHouse Press for bringing this to life. The book is helping me finish my own ‘little polemic’ on a Dingbat near me.