Name: Keven Wang's review of The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars
Item: The 99% Invisible City
Rating: 3
Author: Keven Wang

Roman Mars

Kurt Kohlstedt

“[A] diverse and enlightening book . . . The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.” —The New York Times Book Review “Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t see, see but don’t know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific.” —Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff, Grunt, and Gulp “The 99% Invisible City brings into view the fascinating but often unnoticed worlds we walk and drive through every day, and to read it is to feel newly alive and aware of your place in the world. This book made me laugh, and it made me cry, and it reminded me to always read the plaque.” —John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All The Way Down 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.

A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

The 99% Invisible City

Piet Terheyden

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.

Keven Wang

Eva Decker

Love 99% Invisible and love this book! Minus one star for the lack of photos. The illustrations are aesthetically pleasing but ineffective at communicating detail.

Josh Clement

The podcast and blog feel like you get a deeper dive into these stories.

KADY BURNS

Love the podcast, and really enjoyed the book.

Erin 

Design is one of those things that one struggles to define, even though its one of the most prominent things around us. I did an internship at a design museum a few years ago, and while I have a better grip on it than I did before, I came out of it still hardly knowing how to describe it to others. Everyday design is fascinating to me. Designs are good when you don't even recognise they are there, when they are doing the job they are meant to do without drawing any attention. One of the first things this book talks about are streetlights, and how they have a specially designed base to minimize damage on both ends should a car accidentally drive into it. Something we all see everyday, something we can all recognise, and probably at one point thought to ourselves "huh, I wonder why it looks like that," but not thinking any more of it. That's design for you.

While I do find nearly all aspects of design fascinating, even I found a lot of this book to be quite dense. I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't consider at least some of it dry and/or boring. There is evidently so much research (as per the author's note at the end, over ten years' worth) put into the book that it almost feels like the authors are shoving in as much as possible. The bibliography at the end is insane and very impressive. I liked the way the book was split into sections and how they seamlessly led from one topic to the next. One thing I wish the book did however was be a bit more specific in its headings. I found that instead of simply stating the object/system, it would be listed under the problem that the design needed to solve - which is fine in theory, but because of the aforementioned density and technical speak, it sometimes took a few paragraphs to understand what I was even reading about (however, when they mentioned raccoon-proof garbage cans and instead named the section "Trash Pandas', I had a giggle). As always with non-fiction books, always, always include more pictures. I get it. There's a certain aesthetic to having an artist artfully render sketches in a designed fashion to match the content of the book, but I just want to know what the thing looks like in real life, not an artist's version of it. 

Overall though, I found this book fascinating. Design is so, so cool, and largely goes unnoticed by the general population. In Japan they often put blue lighting in some public restrooms so that intravenous drug users would have a harder time finding their veins. There is an excellent chapter on hostile design too, which is fascinating and probably my favourite part of the book. I'll admit right now that I haven't listened to the podcast this book is associated with, but I'll definitely be checking it out. If there is even half the amount of effort put into it than this book has, it's gotta be pretty good.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Zack Apira

Sapan Parikh

Stephanie Highfield 

Danny White

Evan Huang

Ahmed El-Helw

Mandi Jayne

Mahit

Alex Jones

Joshua Line

"A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast"--

Piet Terheyden &
The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars

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Piet Terheyden &The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars

Reviews

Join the club

Piet Terheyden &
The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars