The winning and honorable mention entries from the Dingbat 2.0 Competition were announced at the LA Forum’s Dingbat 2.0 Exhibition opening on Saturday, June 19th, at LA Forum Events at Woodbury Hollywood. There were eight professional winners and five student winners selected from over 80 entries from 18 countries (number of ‘winners’ includes honorable mentions in both categories). The work of the thirteen winners is being exhibited at the Dingbat 2.0 Exhibition through July 24th.
All the winners and honorable mentions after the break. For complete descriptions of each project, click here.
Professional Winners:
First Place Carmen C. Cham, James Black & Tyler Goss / Footprint / Los Angeles, CA:
The “Microparcelization” project advocates replacing Dingbats with small single-family homes on small lots, to be made possible by new mechanism for subdividing parcels, and to be promoted by an updated version of the Case Study House program. Dingbats were perfect for the zoning, economies, and construction practices of their time, but today they approach the end of their useful lifespan. Aging Dingbats are structurally and environmentally deficient. The Dingbat is the city’s least desirable multifamily housing typology; their nostalgic appeal tugs most strongly at architects themselves. Thousands can be replaced before we should get soft and start to miss them (read more…)
Second Place Gary Paige, Nick Aho, Richard Lucero, Ping Ping Tan / Gary Paige/Studio / Los Angeles, CA:
In an age where the contemporary domestic landscape is defined by different lifestyles and living arrangements, and where the nuclear-family is being supplanted by the post-nuclear or extended family, conventional forms of housing such as the dingbat and suburban tract house are rapidly becoming outmoded, raising critical questions about new models of urban housing. Specifically, several questions emerge: How can contemporary and emerging forms of domesticity lead to strategies for producing programmatic identity and variation? What are ways of theorizing difference for a building type that’s often plagued by spatial uniformity and morphological sameness? And, how can we increase density yet at the same time amplify the resonance of spatial affect and experience (read more…)
Third Place (shared) Liz Falletta / Los Angeles, CA:
Current market fundamentals indicate that real estate developers will not be rebuilding the Dingbat apartment en masse any time soon. While it may be feasible to build a new “stucco box” typology in wealthier neighborhoods during the next cycle, most Dingbats will have to make do with rehabilitation, substantial or otherwise, for the foreseeable future. Alternate solutions that allow Dingbats to more actively and sustainably serve their residents, their communities and the public realm will be required if Los Angeles is to meet the demands of its residential future (read more…)
Third Place (shared) Caroline Filice Smith / Neceth / Spotsylvania, VA:
Honorable Mention John Ferri AIA, Carolyn Matsumoto, Wilson Rodas, Takako Tajima / Los Angeles, CA:
DIG has created a portfolio of exceptional properties that responds to the diversity of southern California lifestyles. DIGWEHO is our newest residential community offering in the highly desirable City of West Hollywood. We have nine distinctive designs for you to explore. With a range of canonical expressions, flexible spatial configurations, efficient construction, and a sophisticated solution to parking ordinance requirements, DIG has redefined the multi-family property experience for all stakeholders (read more…)
Honorable Mention Benjamin Luddy & Makoto Mizutani / Scout Regalia / Los Angeles, CA:
As a reinvention of the distinctively regional dingbat typology, our proposal seeks to maximize the quality of life for residents within the increasingly dense future of the City. “Dingbat Terrarium” is a new vision for multifamily housing in Los Angeles that embraces the utilitarian features of classic dingbats, while proposing creative solutions for a more livable model of rental housing in the City (read more…)
Honorable Mention Ric. Abramson AIA, Daniel Ruiz, Van Pham, Chasen Rainey / Workplays studio*architecture / West Hollywood, CA:
Built for a car-centric society, the Dingbat no longer speaks to a 21st century Los Angeles in which the current expansion of mass transit and interest in a cleaner environment continue to push away from a car-based culture. Yet as a prototype for development, it does retain a specific legacy – the dingbat housing type enables a denser form of infill whose variants and multiplication result in a hyper-specific urban patterning (read more…)
Honorable Mention Jeeyong An, Sang Hwa Lee, Ji Yoon Oh / Ginseng Chicken Architecture P.C. / New York, NY:
The Dingbat, which has long been a residential icon of the Los Angeles area, is direly in need of an update. Transportation and congestion are some of the greatest obstacles that Los Angeles faces today and the traditional Dingbat fails to respond to these problems in many ways. Not only has the limited capacity (6-8 households per building) proven insufficient in accommodating the rapidly increasing population and thus exacerbating already problematic sprawl, but the back-out parking spaces traversing the sidewalks create unfriendly and hazardous walking conditions for pedestrians making the already difficult journey to public transit even more of a challenge (read more…)
Student Winners:
First Place The Choripans: Ignacio Barrios, Ariel Gualtruzzi, Delfina Prause, Mauro Aparo / Universidad Nacional del litoral / Santa Fe, Argentina:
Box decomposition to create a new spatiality, habitability, comfort, ventilation, lighting, preserving density. Parking lots: Relocation underneath the community street, to unify and reorder vehicular traffic within the block, avoiding its use as a vehicular access, restricting it to pedestrians-only. This way the street is provided with a new dynamic, encouraging community interaction. Its construction can be State funded, to later be maintained by a private company (read more…)
Second Place Tim Norris / Arizona State University / Tempe, AZ:
Third Place Ryan Lovett / Columbia University / New York, NY:
It is a place defined by its typological reinventiveness. As the inevitable forces requiring densification necessitated a kind of developer-driven, financially-dictated inventiveness which have yielded such guilty pleasure like the single family detached. From The detached single family house, the dingbat, there seems to be an evolutionary trend towards new typological invention (read more…)
Honorable Mention Margaret M. Fain / Harvard University / Cambridge, MA:
Honorable Mention Tommy Pniewski / Oxford Brookes University / Oxford, UK:
The Streets of LA turn to paradise. The new dingbat gives birth to flora creating a series of beautiful and unique skins visible from cars driving by the neighborhood. The street, formerly occupied by decorated shoe boxes, now emerges; a crowd of lined up sensual curves reminiscent of the Californian hills and the waves of its ocean. The radical and the exotic collide exposing the qualities of its nature and culture. The beauty of self expression is amplified in the skin of the city of angel’s new dingbats. L.A. dwellers are able to turn the floral skins of their dingbat to their own desired aesthetic landmark. Fitting for a city where, more than most, each person is trying to forge an identity , not being just another formless face in one of the world’s biggest centers of business, international trade, entertainment, culture, media, fashion, science, technology and education (read more…)
