A dingbat is a type of apartment building, named for the midcentury-style visual motifs on its exterior, that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s as a vernacular variation of the shoebox style. Dingbats are boxy two or three story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking, built by converting single-family lots into multi-family housing while still providing parking. Mainly found in Southern California but also in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada and Vancouver, they remain in wide use as affordable housing and have drawn later interest as examples of Mid-Century modern design, though their tuck-under parking can create a structurally vulnerable soft story.
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Source Dingbat (building) (Wikipedia)
Source Dingbat (building) (Wikipedia)
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Dingbat (building) (Wikipedia)
Associated With: Timber, Article text
He credits the coining to architect Francis Ventre and describes them: ...[Dingbats] are normally a two-story walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over.
Associated With: Stucco, Article text
He credits the coining to architect Francis Ventre and describes them: ...[Dingbats] are normally a two-story walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over.
In Group: Postwar and Late Modern Styles of North America, Lead paragraph
A dingbat is a type of apartment building, named for the midcentury-esque visual motifs on their exterior, that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular variation of shoebox style "stucco boxes". Dingbats are boxy, two or three-story apartment
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