99% Invisible - 500- 99% Vernacular: Volume 1

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived -- and even some regional vernacular we love from places we haven’t lived, but just admire. 99% Invisible is all about who we are through the lens of the things we build. We often tell stories about how people shape the built world, but these are more about how the built world has shaped us.99% Vernacular: Volume 1

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The first proper single family house I rented in the Bay Area had a weird cabinet in the kitchen. I actually didn't notice it was weird for a long time. From the inside, it just kind of blended in with other kitchen cabinets, but one day I noticed from the outside that there were louvered vents in the wall that brought outside air into just that cabinet. After a fair amount of online digging, I discovered that this is called a California cooler. It's mostly useful for storing fresh fruits and vegetables. Cool air flows in from the lower vent,

while warmer air flows out the upper one. Screens are usually there to keep bugs out, although I don't think mine had a screen anymore, and slats are there to deflect the rain. California coolers were pretty popular a century ago around the Bay Area. They work quite well to keep food cold, if you live within a pretty narrow

band of extremely hospitable temperate climate. The refrigerator and the general preference for hermetically sealed houses made the California cooler somewhat obsolete, so most of them were removed or retrofitted into boring old regular cabinets. But for a while anyway, the East Coast had its barters, the Midwest made great use of its sellers, and California had coolers. After I discovered my California cooler, this simple, regional architectural feature charmed me to no end. So as we were approaching our 500th episode, the folks here on staff started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived, and even some regional vernacular that we love from places we haven't lived, but just admire.

99% of Israel is all about who we are through the lens of the things we build. And on this milestone of an episode, the 99PI staff and some friends of the show have stories not only about how we as humans shape the built world, but how specific bits of the built world have shaped us. These are our love letters to the built world. At first, is Vivian Leigh. If I asked you to name an iconic structure that captures the city of Los Angeles and a nutshell, you have a lot of options to choose from. The Hollywood sign,

perched on the hills and somehow shining through the smog probably jumps to the front of your mind. That was just amazing branding. Or you may think of the Santa Monica Pier if you're a tourist who came for the sunshine and the hashtag vibes. Maybe it's Dodger Stadium if you're a sports fan. It's even possible you'll think of that futuristic arched tower at LAX, if you're a psychopath. But for me, as someone who for years

loved this gorgeously messy city from within, I think of my former home, the Dingbat. Whether or not people know the name Dingbat, if they've visited Los Angeles, they've seen Dingbatts. Dingbatts are kind of hiding in plain sight, right? They're all over Los Angeles. You see them everywhere. In architecture, certainly in my education, as well as just the profession, had largely ignored them.

That first voice you heard is Joshua Stein, and the second is Thurmond Grant. Together, they co-edited a book called Dingbat 2.0, the iconic Los Angeles apartment as projection of a metropolis. If you find yourself utterly confused by the term dingbat, it's basically a type of low-rise multifamily apartment building that typically has about six to 12 units. Most have completely flat roofs, but probably their defining feature

is their tuck under parking. This basically means that on one side of the building, their parking spaces carved out of the building, their parking space is carved out of the first floor with units behind and on top. This soft story, combined with the modern flat roof, makes the structure look like a box propped up on skinny stilts from certain angles. Like it's this box that floats there and then in the case of dingbat, you just decorate that. You can find this type of housing scattered in different parts of North America, but LA is famous for its dingbats.

In 1971, the architectural historian Rainer Bannum even wrote that dingbats were, quote, the true symptom of Los Angeles's urban id, trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living. These apartments arose in the 1950s and 60s and were a fascinating approach to scaling up Southern California. They somehow delivered both sprawl and density in the midst of an enormous population boom.

This is the mid-century, this is post-war, right? And so, the exuberance of the post war years. You know, there was an influx of people just moving to Southern California. So there was an obvious need for housing. And you know, that everybody moving to California, a lot of them were also pursuing this California dream, where everybody imagines that they're going to be living in a single family house. But of course, a single family home for every single person flocking to Southern California

was impossible. So you know, they get the next best thing, or they kind of get the single family home light. You could pull into the carport of your dingbat, and if you squint it, it almost felt like you had your own personal driveway. And unlike with larger apartment buildings, the corridors of a dingbat were all exterior, so you'd walk right up to your front door

almost as if it was your own house. It was like two thirds of the California dream. But the important thing about dingbats was that they made the most out of their real estate. DingBats were a design that allowed developers and mom and pop landowners to tear down a single family home and build up multifamily housing on that same lot. So these buildings were just big enough to increase density without totally disrupting the residential feel of a neighborhood.

The DingBat actually did an amazing job of densifying the city, while still maintaining some character of what we understood to be Los Angeles. These apartments were starter homes for a lot of people because of their affordability. They were made quickly and efficiently using inexpensive materials like Stucco and prefabricated aluminum window frames. So it became this sort of preferred model to accommodate the rush, and it was just kind of like figured out how to do it as efficiently as possible

using all these sort of tricks. But their simple construction did result in a certain amount of sameness. In a given neighborhood, you would see the same repetitive cuboid structures again and again and again, with the exception of course of the facades. The beauty is that the distinction becomes in the stylization of the facade. The facades were an attempt to differentiate

winding that from another, and the aesthetics were truly the embodiment of mid-century kitsch. A lot of them were decorated with modern abstract decals like starbursts as an homage to the space age. It was also pretty common for the front of the buildings to feature a name that tried to evoke sophistication but really read more like budget vacation. There's all these references to say exotic you know fantasies of like traveling abroad or something like that or like the Sahara or the tropics. There is the Riviera or the Casablanca or the Capri or the Beverly Capri or the Lido Capri.

There's this building called the Crepe spelled C-R-A-P-I. There are a lot of dingbats that might be called the Capri. So it's a playoff of that, but it's also sort of like the dingbat is becoming self-aware. In the family tree of architecture, if the Victorian home is your stuffy, conservative aunt, and the California contemporary is your cool cousin who studied abroad in Spain, the dingbat is like your drunk uncle who shows up to Thanksgiving in a colipso shirt and dockers. Like, what are they? They've got these varied facades, but they're really just the same building.

They're kind of just considered the dumb stucco box. I am more than a little biased when it comes to this form of architecture. When I moved to LA, I hopped around from place to place for years. But the first time I had my name on a lease, it was a dingbat. It was the first place that truly felt mine. But as a former resident, I can also speak fully to their flaws. Remember those lovely outdoor corridors? Not so fun if you lived on the ground floor like me.

There are so many people walking by all day that lucky loose could stare right through my prefabricated aluminum-framed window and into my living room. I had to keep the shades closed at all times, so my apartment quickly became a houseplant graveyard from the lack of natural light. And that unique tuck under parking, it turns out that the thin columns holding up the building above, well, they caused a not insignificant vulnerability to seismic activity, which is a little concerning when you live in a city famous for seismic activity, which is a little concerning when you live in a city famous for seismic activity.

And the efficient and inexpensive material used to construct these buildings, well, it wasn't the best at soundproofing. You could literally hear everything. These are significant critiques. Of course, we can understand why somebody would have a problem with the thing that both were basically, but that also as a living experience.

They were cheap, they were tacky, and when zoning regulations and building codes phased them out of production, not many people batted an eye. Even the people who defend them have a hard time justifying their preservation. I think we both can see both sides of it it and I don't think either one of us would advocate for all things that's being saved at all costs. You know, there are a lot of copyrights out there and even some crappy ones. But still, there's a lot to love and a lot to learn from dingbats. They helped make a seemingly inaccessible city

a little more accessible to hundreds of thousands of residents. And yes, they may look like they were designed by a 13-year-old in Minecraft, but as we're all taught from childhood, it's what's on the inside that counts. You know, 50, 60 years later, who's living in dingbats?

Well, it's actually incredibly diverse. What is the range of different family structures, roommate scenarios, immigrants from where, and it's pretty amazing just the slice of life of Los Angeles that you have. How it reflects the makeup of the greater in the ding bag. My ding bag apartment was like a shell that I eventually outgrew. These buildings weren't built to last. They were built to give people like me a start. And when I look back on my time there, I'm flooded, not just with nostalgia, but gratitude. I wish I had fully appreciated that apartment while I was living through this phase of my life. It's the place where I got to try adulthood on for size.

My then boyfriend became my fiance in the living room of that dingbat. He's my now husband, and we tend to reminisce about that old apartment a lot. We wonder who's living there now, if they figured out how to keep their houseplants alive. If they ever got that squishy part of the bathroom linoleum checked out,

where will they go next? And when they're gone, will they miss that dumb, stucco box as much as we do. So, Alexander Laine, tell me about the first piece of architecture you ever really loved. It was very small, about 13 inches by 9 inches. It was the Fisher Price Play Family A-Frame, which is this adorable dollhouse that has a turquoise, shingled, a-frame roof. And when you move the handle on the top, you can fold down the side and get to the inside of the dollhouse and the folded-down part of the roof becomes a patio and it has a sticker on it

that shows flagstones. It's a. It's such a clever design. It really is. I mean, it's just, it's so smart. For anyone who doesn't know what an A-frame is, just picture a big capital letter A triangles on the front and the back. And it's got essentially no sidewalls. So the steeply slope roof basically goes all the way to the ground. So did your love of this A-Frame dollhouse

translate to a love of A-Frames in the real world? I do love A-Frames. I mean, I was already familiar with them because my grandparents build a ski house in Vermont in the late 1940s in an area where there are a lot of little A-Frframe villages for people to rent for skiing. They like to call them shellays and charge more money, but a-frames really aren't Swiss at all. If you look at Swiss mountain houses, they have a

much flatter gable roof. It's still pitched because the snow still has to slide off the roof. But the idea that the A-frame is some Swiss architecture that has been imported to Vermont is just completely made up. And so if they're not Swiss, what are they? Well, that's one of the wild things about them. You can find afraimes anywhere. Like there are Polynesian Island longhouses that have an afraim structure. There are Japanese mountain villages

that have afraim structures. And you'll even see them in kind of desert climates like Palm Springs, where usually they have white walls and are kind of bleached out as if you've left your afray mount in the sun for too long. Attent is really an afray. It's such an easy way to create shelter that you see them in basically any country that has a lot of rain or a lot of snow

or a need to put up a kind of quick and dirty structure. So part of the thing that interests me is that you can dress up your a-frame to kind of suit whatever narrative you're trying to promote. So Vermont trying to kind of upscale itself with these ski chalets, like when in one direction with the a a frames, they're usually dark wood and they'll have these white gingerbread balconies. But there are a lot of a frames that are more of a log cabin wilderness a frame and you see like the big chunky logs sticking out of the end under the a frame roof. Yeah, it seems that they're common denominator, at least here in the US, is that they're second homes. Yeah. The rise of the A-frame really corresponds to the rise of vacations in the US.

And in the postwar era, people had so much more disposable income. And there was so much road building. So people were going to new places to go on vacation, and they needed a really simple house that could be built from a kit to take their vacation in. And the A-Frame was the ideal version of that very simple structure. And actually a lot of like wood companies

came up with A-Frame kits to sell their product. So you could buy the Douglas Fir Association a frame kit and build it on the new lake. Like when you think about a kit house, like the Fisher Price House is the same thing. You can just like pick it up and put it anywhere. And so why is it not that suitable for living in all the time? Like why is it mainly evocational? The principal reason is that when you're inside an A-frame, everyone has to be together all the time.

I was actually talking about doing this piece with my 11-year-old and he agrees that A-frames are very cool. But he immediately said, yeah, but you know, it's like everyone has to play the board game when you're in A-Frame because they're basically one big room and then, you know, usually with glass filling in the triangle and then they'll have a mezzanine in the back for the bedrooms. But there's really no privacy. Like you wouldn't want it to be your house all the time. You want to be in an A-frame when you're on vacation with your family and all there is to do is swim in the lake, hang you just have peace and nature and of you.

Like there's so many different versions of that vacation, you know, it can be on a lake, it can be at the beach, it can be in the mountains. But all of us want that moment of peace and relaxation and it feels like the A-frame can deliver that to you. And I feel like the reason I loved that play family A-frame was because even as a child, I wanted my house to be a little bit more fun. I was at the time when I was coveting my friend's doll houses. I was living in a very traditional Victorian house and Cambridge Massachusetts. And so the A-frame seemed quite exotic to me. And I held on to that love of the A-frame for so many years that when one of my kids showed an interest in doll houses, I actually went on Etsy and bought one, like bought a vintage one. So you got the toy you always wanted, but would you ever get an A-frame that you could actually

live in, you know, only for two weeks out of the year? So I love A-frames, and my child that I bought the play family A-Frame for loves A-Frames. But my husband, who is an architect, does not love A-Frames. We were talking at one point about buying some property in Vermont and I said, oh, like this is finally my chance to have an A-frame. And I had this whole vision in my mind of an A-frame for our family and I guess A-frame connected by a deck, like, beautiful vision. And my husband was just like, no, I hate A-frames. What's wrong with that,joy. I think like any good architect, he is more concerned with the practicalities. He just finds them too kitschy, too inflexible, too dark, and that's not really his style.

So even today, you're denied your dream home. Yes, I'm never going to get my A-frame. Thank you so much, I'll say, I appreciate it. After the break, we join our own Christopher Johnson on the porch. Stay with us. Here's Christopher Johnson. My family's roots are in rural North Carolina. Growing up, I just heard folks call it the country. As in, we're going down to the country this weekend to see your grandma. My great-grandmother, Pearl, lived mostly alone in a small farmhouse on a huge piece of land

that's been in the family for generations. It sits back from the country road surrounded by crop fields and swampy woods. Grandma, Pearl and I spent whole summers together. As soon as school got out, my mom would drive me down to the country in her green granada, dropping me off under a massive pee can tree that shaded grandma's house. She'd look down at me and say, I love you, stinky, see you in August. Visiting grandma Pearl was the best.

She made biscuits from scratch that were otherworldly. She kept sweet tea in the fridge, and I loved to hug her. She always smelled like VO5. I spent my days playing in the dusty plough fields, harassing tadpoles and picking apples and bramble berries. At night, dinner, dessert, and probably my favorite part of the evening hanging out with her on the front porch. favorite part of the evening hanging out with her on the front porch. Man, I loved porch time with Grandma Pearl. Back then, my middle schooler life at home was a little complicated.

But on those Carolina summer nights, out in the cool breezy zen of that country porch, we just sit in Grandma's metal rocking chairs, listening to the frogs and watching the lightning bugs Things slowed way down for me and I needed that On the weekends neighbors would stop by to say hello to Miss Pearl They'd join us on the porch and spread rumors about recent bear sightings By the way, grandma said moonshineers made those stories up just to keep folks out of the woods and away from their stills. Country people can talk, and there was never a rush. We'd be on the porch for hours.

They called it visiting, like church or the market or walking through town. The porch was the space to get news and to gossip. Of course, you can find front porches all over the US, but down south, porches like the One-Egrama Pearls house, they've long been fixtures deeply tied to the land. Because the south was for so long, predominantly agrarian, so it fit in with the agrarian traditions of processing crops on your front porch.

So the porch is part of collective southern identity. As a kid, Jocelyn Donlon also spent a lot of time on her grandma's front porch, doing the same stuff Grandma Pearl and I did, like snapping and shelling pole beans. That was in Louisiana, and it inspired Jocelyn to write her book about porch life and southern culture. My grandmother was always working on that porch. She used to whip marangs out there. I have memories of that. She did a lot of crocheting. She never sat out there and did nothing. So it was for her and outdoor workspace. And for a lot of southerners, it's also a storytelling space.

That's partly because it gets hell-a-hot down south. As a space built to keep out the southern sun, the front porch naturally invites people in. Add some rocking chairs, maybe a nice evening breeze, a little something to sip on, and nobody's leaving. Folks are going to stay, and they're gonna talk. The South still is very much an oral culture. So I think that the impulse to storytelling

certainly affected the identity of the front porch. It's this kind of love that's made the front porch such an iconic piece of southern culture. Zora Neal Hurston, William Faulkner, Gloria Nailer, writers of Long Center Front Porches to talk about what's difficult, mystical, and beautiful about life in the South. Southern musicians use the porch a lot too. And what's been called the signature shot from Lemonade,

Beyonce and half a dozen black women, artists, and creators sit posted up strong on a wooden front porch. Others name check the front porch right in their songs. I'm the front porch, I'm the front porch, I'm the front porch. The rain porch. See, you want the front porch in my home. I missed a porch, you gave me a song. The front porch may be the perfect muse, but socially it can also be a complicated space. That's partly because of where it sits.

This extension of the private home jutting all out into the wide open world. For people you're cool with, it's a space to share, but it can also be used to keep some folks at a distance. That in-betweenness can make porch life really complex, and I saw some of these complexities play out right on grandma Pearl's porch. I could tell how close she was to a visitor based on whether or not they came inside her house, or if they only got as close as the porch. Her front porch might have been wide open, but it was still part of Miss Pearl's house.

It's a deeply personal space. Like, it seems like it's public, but it's deeply personal. In his research on the history of black people in front porches, architect and designer Jermaine Barnes has come across plenty of folks who use their porches the same way my grandma did. So think of it from porch as a barrier of sorts, right? It's like it's the force field.

It keeps all the people away who are not supposed to get you home. When it comes to race, these kinds of front porch social rules can get nasty. Some of the black southerners that Jocelyn Donlon interviewed for her book recall white homeowners who refused to let them on the front porch, sending them instead around to the back. And then there's black folks spending time on their own porches. There's a long history of controlling black labor and leisure in the US, and there have been real efforts to restrict, police, and even shame those who wanted to gather and relax on their porches.

There's a whole racist slur that I'm not gonna repeat here that specifically attacks black southerners for enjoying their porches. When black folks want to get together and have a good time, a simple front porch can become a very contentious space. And in a way, the American front porch has always been fraught. Its history is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, and that story starts in pre-colonial Africa.

The porch, as an architectural feature, can be linked all the way back to West Africa, and it was seen as a place of commerce where people would exchange goods. When those Africans were enslaved, they brought this building typology with them, drawing on their expertise as they built homes throughout the hot humid Caribbean. And then around the late 1700s, the front porch jumped from the West Indies and to what eventually became the United States.

The Haitian Revolution played a huge role here because it sparked a massive migration to Louisiana territory. And that's where Haitians introduced the shotgun house and its front porch. By the early 1800s the front porch became more and more common throughout the American South. Most people used their very humble porches to do work and to keep cool since porches were

often raised up off the ground to allow air to flow. For slave holding planters, the front porch could also function as a dais, which they used to assert control. Slave owners used it as a place to sort of be totalitarian, those iconic images of someone standing there, fucking down to someone else, like that's literally what that vertical dominance allows you to do. The porch is a podium of sorts. Some of those planters became incredibly rich,

and they deployed the vernacular form to flaunt their wealth. They had mansions with massive multi-story Greek revival front porches, sometimes with columns. These sprawling or Nate gone with the wind type of fares were also symbols of Confederate defiance. Planta's Tweet Front Porch design to show their faith in the power and the permanence of an economy based on slavery. Starting around the 1860s, Front Porch's began spreading way beyond the South.

Popular home design books, new building techniques, and a movement in architecture that was focused on nature and landscapes all helped make the front porch super trendy across the country. Slavery and war had helped bring the front porch to the U.S. and it was the end of war that brought on the porch's demise. The housing crisis after World War II meant home construction needed to be fast and it needed to be cheap. Some things had to go and that included the front porch. But what really did the porch in was air conditioning. By the 60s, AC was pretty common in American homes. Why would you sit on a porch in the heat with mosquitoes

when you've got an ice cold reason inside? We sat on my grandmother's porch so much because she refused to have air conditioning and it was hellishly hot. She hated air conditioning. In August 2020, during the first COVID summer, I took a trip down to North Carolina. I was desperate for the quiet and the fresh open air. Grandma Pearl isn't there anymore, but her house is. When I pulled into Grandma's driveway,

I could almost see her there. By the well, and her apron and wireframe glasses, waving in the slow Carolina summer heat under that enormous peak entry. I sat on her front porch every night before bed. I'd forgotten how noisy it was, with the bullfrogs and the crickets and all the other animals that grandma could name just by hearing their calls. Of course, I didn't get to sit with her and snap whole beans, or laugh with neighbors stopping by to have a glass of cold sweet tea and visit.

I got none of that great Southern storytelling that's made the front porch legendary. But out on that country porch that my great great grandfather built with his hands more than a hundred years ago, I did get something else, something that's made this space so special and enduring. I got some stillness and I got some peace, just listening to the Whipper Wheels. We're doing a couple more episodes like this where you're here from many of the people who work on the show in a more personal way. It felt like a fun way for us to celebrate 500 episodes. The way you can help us celebrate is to share your favorite episode of 99PI on social media. It can be a recent episode.

It can be from the distant past. It doesn't matter. Or please write a five-star review on Apple podcasts. Maybe even do both. As much as I am proud of having accomplished 500 episodes, I think when a new person stumbles upon a podcast with that much history, it can feel a little daunting. So I would really appreciate it

if you would help guide people to us in a nice way. Thank you for everything, beautiful nerds. 99% of visible was produced this week by Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, and Kirk Holstad, mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzales, music by our director of sound, Swan Rial, by gram hasha. Delaney Hall is the executive producer, the rest of the team, includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Baroubaig, Lashma Dawn, Sophia Klotzkar, Jason DeLeone, Joe Rosenberg, intern Sarah Baker, and me Roman Mars. 99% of Israel is part of the Stitcher

and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and write it too. You can find links to others to share shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.

Congratulations. You have listened to the 500th episode of 99% Invisible. Pupu, puu, puu, puu, puu. From Stitcher and Sirius XM. Pupu! you