A Field Guide to the Wonders of the Modern Metropolis
Roman Mars, 99% Invisible: 99% Invisible City (2020, Hodder & Stoughton)
288 pages
English language
Published July 24, 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton.
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.
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
