If you lived here, you’d be home now

The dingbat is to residential building in Los Angeles what strip malls are to its commercial construction: a space-optimizing method of squeezing cash from the landscape while blighting it aesthetically. It’s the capitalist version of Soviet drabness and uniformity, with a family resemblance, given the climate, to the Cuban forays into architectural “socialist realism.” (Just after the revolution, Che and Fidel were smitten by architectural modernism; they soon lost interest and put up the kinds of cellblock behemoths defacing much of Eastern Europe.) A bad idea run amok, these one- or two- (sometimes three-) story stucco shoeboxes that nearly everyone lives in at one time or another in L.A. have an existential emptiness that can be gussied up and dissembled by track lighting and the right sort of throw pillows and furniture, but the spatial insipidity of the dingbat eventually defeats most efforts to turn a “unit” into “home,” even when little sparkle lights enliven the facade.

Like strip malls, however, dingbats have persisted and spread through the city so inexorably -- epidemically between 1945 and the early ‘60s, like mushrooms after a heavy rain -- that a kind of delectation of their various styles becomes possible. They are, after all, the standard vernacular and admittedly often quite livable, their units not at all predictably functional or dysfunctional when viewed from outside. It must be said that dingbat functionality is strictly a matter of maintenance (some dingbats are kept up with considerable pride by their proprietors; others are left to rot by meretricious landlords), since the apartment layouts of a dingbat are invariably as boxy and generic as the building shell: studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, with unimportant variations in the placement of kitchen and bathroom.

It makes sense that Clive Piercy’s “Pretty Vacant” carries no text besides the author’s introduction -- what is there really to say about these excrescences, except that one either has a perverse fondness for them or a powerful revulsion against them? -- and its 1 1/2-inch-thick bulk consists entirely of exterior black-and-white snapshots, taken by Piercy from his car window, without commentary. Piercy, a graphic designer, offers us something closely akin to Ed Ruscha’s serial documentation of Los Angeles boulevards. (Ruscha is thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.) His introduction credits the architect Francis Ventre with naming the dingbat. “[T]hey all began life as variations on the modernist stucco box that had effectively replaced, through economic necessity and postwar inventiveness, the Spanish colonial revival style that had dominated up until then,” Piercy writes. “Structurally, that’s what they consist of: generic boxes on three sides with all of the attention paid to the street facades.” The difference-within-sameness revealed in “Pretty Vacant” is the kind associated with the thread patterns of Warhol silk screens; they’re all much the same, but if you look carefully, each has its distinct, if ultimately meaningless, fingerprint.

Warhol taught America to embrace and reify its own visual ugliness as a new version of beauty, since this ugliness is an irreversible fait accompli. If we must live in an ever-expanding human hive, so quantified and electronically tagged that we’re becoming interchangeable consumers and surveillance objects in densities that will one day achieve Asiatic mass, the little differences between a monstrosity called the Capri and a twin called the Flamingo acquire the cachet of something like concepts. Like many things in California, the dingbat represents the triumph of quantity over quality and illustrates the leveling effect of true democracy. The dingbat owes nothing to utopian city planning or to architecture as an art. These are not Case Study Houses and bear no resemblance to any such deeply considered scheme of “affordable housing.” They do owe something to Frank Lloyd Wright: If you took all the thought and nuance out of one of his blockier houses, this is what you’d get.

Somewhere in Warhol’s weirdly voluminous writings it’s remarked that the queen of England can’t buy a better hot dog at a baseball game than you or me. This was meant to illustrate what was great about America, and at certain times of the day it’s the kind of thing one does enjoy about the sensory overload of American cities: that just about everybody has to put up with similar environmental importunity. But not everyone stuck in traffic is headed home to a dingbat apartment.

Dingbats are not so much declasse or redolent of actual poverty as they are an architecture of transience, of three-month leases or month-to-month rentals, in some ways ideal for the dicey professions so many Angelenos follow: illegal hair salons, “therapeutic massage” and a spectrum of feast-or-famine jobs in the entertainment industry, from acting to video editing. One can move from dingbat to dingbat on an income scale that slides up and down, and the very flimsiness of these buildings, which are usually supported on stilts on at least one side to make room for carports, encourages the idea that residing in one is invariably temporary, that the people inside are waiting to bottom out and segue to a skid row hotel, hoping for the right Richard Neutra to come on the market or looking for something in between -- a guesthouse in the hills, a Silver Lake triplex with a long-term lease, a bungalow in Atwater Village.

This is precisely where dingbats serve a palpable social need: as housing for people who want the option of reinvention -- or overnight flight, as did Alan Arkin and his family in Tamara Jenkins’ brilliant 1998 film, “Slums of Beverly Hills.” The anonymity of the dingbat, given the lavish architectural marvels available in Los Angeles to those who are truly doing well, mirrors the anonymity of its occupants. Piercy’s affectionate visual documentation, replete with close-ups of the surface details by which their anonymous builders have sought to give them some kind of personality, evokes the pathos and longing of those not-always-impossible wishes and dreams that draw people to Los Angeles, city of dreams, from the obdurately hidebound heartland. *