A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
Roman Mars, Kurt Kohlstedt: 99% Invisible City (2020, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company)
384 pages
English language
Published Nov. 15, 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast
Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?
Or stopped to consider why you don't see metal fire escapes on new buildings?
Or pondered the story behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?
99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.
Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, …
A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast
Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?
Or stopped to consider why you don't see metal fire escapes on new buildings?
Or pondered the story behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?
99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.
Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.
By the makers of the 99% Invisible podcast, this book offers dozens of bite-sized views of the built environment, its limitations, and those who would transcend them.
It has a particular worldview, one somewhere between New Urbanists and City Beautiful. But it acknowledges and calls itself on this view continually, noting that improvement to some is gentrification to others.
Pretty fun, tapas-like stories about the built world in cities. I wish [a:Roman Mars|19916841|Roman Mars|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] and [a:Kurt Kohlstedt|19916842|Kurt Kohlstedt|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] had put the book format to a bit more use, though; if you'd had Mars read this with some soft indie instrumentals in the background, the book would be indistinguishable from an episode of the podcast. A podcast which, to be clear, I very much enjoy; but I was hoping for some more depth, or photographs, or diagrams, or any of the other things that are easier to do in a book than in a podcast. Mars and Kohlstedt talked on the podcast recently about wanting to make the book accessible for the reader who started at any point in the book, but I wish there had been a greater attempt to weave a greater narrative through the story bits.
There is a lot to like about this book. It's really …
Pretty fun, tapas-like stories about the built world in cities. I wish [a:Roman Mars|19916841|Roman Mars|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] and [a:Kurt Kohlstedt|19916842|Kurt Kohlstedt|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] had put the book format to a bit more use, though; if you'd had Mars read this with some soft indie instrumentals in the background, the book would be indistinguishable from an episode of the podcast. A podcast which, to be clear, I very much enjoy; but I was hoping for some more depth, or photographs, or diagrams, or any of the other things that are easier to do in a book than in a podcast. Mars and Kohlstedt talked on the podcast recently about wanting to make the book accessible for the reader who started at any point in the book, but I wish there had been a greater attempt to weave a greater narrative through the story bits.
There is a lot to like about this book. It's really compellingly-written, impressively smooth in its prose and stunningly well-researched (seriously, 30% of the e-book version is bibliography). I'm really looking forward to the next 99pi book; hopefully it'll be more depth than breadth.
