A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
hardcover, 400 pages
Published Oct. 6, 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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.
This book gives wonderful little tidbits and facts of the “ordinary” things you might not really notice in your commute around your city; from colourful utility codes on city streets to faux building fronts strategically hiding electric substations to acts of “guerrilla gardening.”
I never knew of the podcast, of which the books is based on, but now I’m excited to give it a listen.
I was pretty hyped about this book. But since I listen to the podcast, I already knew most of these stories. Since each one is so short, they can’t go in depth (unlike in, say, a podcast episode).
This is probably a lovely coffee-table book, but it has two super-irritating things.
It talks a lot about all kinds of interesting things, things that you almost have to see in order to understand, and then decided to illustrate them with an annoying undetailed sketch. Flags of cities in the US? You get one badly redrawn thing, which I'm sure is supposed to be clever and consistent, but it's consistently irritating. There are lots of things described here that I'd love to peer at and think about, but instead some annoying illustrator has just dashed off a quick, stylised drawing of it.
The second thing is the length of each segment. If you've ever listened to the podcast, you'll know that it's a long, 30-minute meander through all kinds of detail about one particular element of this book. So, yes, there's a 30-minute exploration of flags of cities in the …
This is probably a lovely coffee-table book, but it has two super-irritating things.
It talks a lot about all kinds of interesting things, things that you almost have to see in order to understand, and then decided to illustrate them with an annoying undetailed sketch. Flags of cities in the US? You get one badly redrawn thing, which I'm sure is supposed to be clever and consistent, but it's consistently irritating. There are lots of things described here that I'd love to peer at and think about, but instead some annoying illustrator has just dashed off a quick, stylised drawing of it.
The second thing is the length of each segment. If you've ever listened to the podcast, you'll know that it's a long, 30-minute meander through all kinds of detail about one particular element of this book. So, yes, there's a 30-minute exploration of flags of cities in the US, curiously none the worse for not being able to see any of them. We learn all kinds of fascinating details of each subject. But this book appears to skim through a barely-detailed summary of what you need to know; none of that interesting detail, no real data or information about anything in particular, and the chapters are so short, before you are quite expecting it, they end just like this review has
