АҚШ Қызыл белдеуінің «дингбат» үйлері

Apartment type in the US's Sun Belt

A dingbat is a type of apartment building 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 houses with overhangs sheltering street front parking. They remain widely in use today as “bastions of affordable shelter.” The dingbat, like the bungalow court, was a "popular and populist form of housing." Mainly found in Southern California, but also in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, and Vancouver, Canada, dingbats vary in cost from inexpensive to high end. Some replaced more distinctive but less profitable building structures, such as single family Victorian 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. 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 many shear walls in the parking level. Soft story buildings can collapse during an earthquake.

The first textual reference to the term "dingbat" was made by Reyner Banham in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). 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. These are the materials that Rudolf Schindler and others used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and the dingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitive modern architecture. 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

While the word is sometimes said to reference dingbat in the sense of a "general term of disparagement", 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, designed to maximize land use, stretch their footprints to the lot line and are typically 50 feet (15 m) wide by 100 feet (30 m) deep. Always cuboid, the stucco boxes usually contain six to twelve apartments per building. Most dingbats are covered in stucco, sometimes along with other materials like vertical wooden clapboard, concrete blocks or river rock. The stilts that support the cantilevered portion of the building are generally made of metal or stucco covered wood. Two standard elements of the dingbat type are multiple entrances and the illusion of single family residential density. The front of the building usually has one entrance or no entrances, presenting a unified front to the street. Unit interiors are defined by minimalism, typically consisting of bare rectangular rooms with simple windows, little to no built in interior detail, and only the most basic fixtures. This makes their appeal highly dependent upon the furnishings and decorations brought by the residents. The external ornamentation holds most of the aesthetic appeal that is to be found in a stucco box. Their dingbats, if detached, are collected by fans of the Space Age, Tiki and mid century American design in general. Critic Mimi Zeiger said, "[Stucco boxes] wear their accessories—star shaped wrought iron, carriage lamps, decorative tile, coats of arms—like clip on jewelry. Baubles and brooches designed to emulate a glamour just beyond reach." (Other popular decorations include electric light torches, stylized animals and geometric designs that evoke Piet Mondrian's art.) Dingbats often have a name applied to the face of the building in cursive writing. Some used the name of the street (The Redondo sat on Redondo Avenue, etc.) and others referenced fantasy lifestyles and geographies: tropical paradises (the Caribbean, the Riviera, Hawaii) or stately dwellings of rarefied provenance (villas, castles).

Their bare architecture and boxy appearance mean that dingbats are considered an eyesore and a demolition target in many towns. A city plan for Sarasota, Florida, adopted in 2000 included a gallery of buildings found in the city, with only the dingbat being pointed out as an "undesirable" building type. Similarly, in 1999, the northern California city of El Cerrito published a master plan in which "Older 'stucco box' apartment buildings will be replaced with more up to date and better quality apartments and condominiums." Dingbats are decried by many urban planners due to their relatively lower densities and large parking areas, which reduces the attractiveness and usefulness of street level pedestrian space. Some dingbats move the parking into the rear or side of the building, and use the front for a more welcoming pedestrian entrance. One design magazine states that, "The construction of one dingbat on a street of elegant rowhouses is enough to send property values plummeting," and subsequently calls for more form based codes, a type of building design ordinance that distinguishes between the aesthetic (and therefore socio economic) value of dingbats and rowhouses. However, the tendency of dingbats to lower property values in an area can be highly beneficial to working class renters who would otherwise be unable to afford housing in the area. The widespread construction of dingbats across Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the accompanying decrease in property values, was a major catalyst for the subsequent backlash by NIMBY groups which greatly restricted multi family construction throughout the region. In 2016, authors Thurman Grant and Joshua G. Stein, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, published the book Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis that details the historical, sociological, and architectural importance of the dingbats in Los Angeles. Grant argues that the dingbat “can be considered an icon of the 20th century, in all its kitschy glory", and that demolishing the buildings would remove an essential part of Los Angeles history. The solution to this vulnerability is to reinforce the overhanging sections with stronger support materials, such as steel I beams or thick wooden columns. Many cities, including Los Angeles, have required owners of soft story buildings to retrofit them with additional reinforcement.

Photographer Lesley Marlene Siegel has been documenting the Southern California dingbat in photos since the 1990s. Her catalog now comprises over 2,300 images and culminated in a 2003 solo show called "Apartment Living Is Great". Another Los Angeles artist, Clive Piercy, published a 480 image photography book the same year, entitled Pretty Vacant: The Los Angeles Dingbat Observed. In the 1998 film The Slums of Beverly Hills, teenager Viv (Natasha Lyonne) laments that her family is constantly moving from one dingbat to another. "Casa Bella", she says, surveying the stucco facade of a building the family is moving into, "another dingbat. Dingbats—that's what they're called. Two story apartment buildings featuring cheap rents and fancy names that promise the good life, but never deliver."