ABSTRACT
“Type in Transition” examines how regulatory and financial constraints can eclipse design opportunities. Both case study projects, the National Boulevard Apartments (1954), designed and developed by architect Raymond Kappe, and the developer-built apartment building directly across the street (1955), struggled to adapt existing housing models to the increased allowable density and stricter development standards contained in the city’s still-new 1946 zoning code. Because of their generous hillside sites, both are able to preserve the access to outdoor space that characterized the courtyard and garden apartments that precede them while prefiguring the higher unit counts, open front garages and wide curb cuts that characterize the dingbat apartments that followed them. Although architects and designers are trained to innovate and adapt existing housing types to reflect changing cultural values, tastes and standards, dingbats’ tight infill sites and high lot coverage limited design innovation to scripted font signage and other outlandish surface decoration. Consequently, dingbats addressed significant housing demand from the mid-1950s through the 1970s but without the character, amenity and intimate scale of the earlier housing types. Design matters. This case shows how thoughtful design, either vernacular or avant-garde, can turn the constraints inherent in urban planning and real estate development into opportunities but only to a certain point.
