The 99% Invisible City A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

Book Name: The 99% Invisible City A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
Author: Roman Mars
Publisher: HMH Books
ISBN-10, 13: 978-0358126607,0358126606
Year: 2020
Pages: 400 pages
Language: English
File size: 52 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

The 99% Invisible City A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design Pdf Book Description:

The world is full of amazing things. walk around any major city. and you will find soaring skyscrapers that inspire awe, bridges that are marvels of engineering, and lush parks that provide respite from the concrete landscape. There are travel guides for all of that. This, however, is a guide to the overlooked and ordinary: the boring stuff. The truth is that the mundane objects we pass by without noticing or trip over without thinking can represent as much genius and innovation as the tallest building, the longest bridge, or the most manicured park. So much of the conversation about design centers on beauty, but the more fascinating stories of the built world are about problem-solving, historical constraints, and human drama. This has always been the worldview of the 99% Invisible podcast. Since 2010, we have told stories about all the thought that goes into things most people don’t think about. Our name references the everyday objects that are invisible because of their everydayness, but it also refers to the invisible parts of things you do notice. In the case of something like the Chrysler Building, the aesthetics and architecture of the massive Art Deco tower are only 1% of the story.

It’s our mission to tell you the hidden parts of the story: the speed of its construction, the building’s place in the great Manhattan skyscraper race, the iconoclastic architect who designed it, and his daring, secret strategy to beat out the competition at the last possible moment. As beautiful as the Chrysler Building is, the 99% Invisible part is the best part. In this book, unlike the podcast, we get the opportunity to show you pretty images (illustrated by Patrick Vale) that help tell the hidden history and development of these designs. That said, this guide is not meant to be an encyclopedia that provides a few rote paragraphs about the inventor and origin story of each object. You have Wikipedia for that. This is about breaking down the cityscape into its more fascinating subparts. Rather than tell you about the first traffic light, we’d rather tell you about the most interesting traffic light in the world: the one in Syracuse, New York, that has the green light above the red light as a display of Irish pride. Instead of recounting the construction of the jaw-dropping Brooklyn Bridge, we introduce you to the aesthetically mundane Can Opener bridge in Durham, North Carolina, which has an uncanny history of shearing off the tops of tall trucks trying to pass underneath. The Brooklyn Bridge represents an incredible advancement in engineering, but Durham’s Norfolk Southern Gregson Street Overpass illustrates the perils of sclerotic modern transit bureaucracy, something citizens bang their heads against every day.