Revisiting The 99% Invisible City
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How did the 99 % Invisible City book launch and what’s its purpose?
This is the ninety nine percent invisible city. I'm Roman Mars. Five years ago, we came out with a book, and thanks to all you beautiful nerds, it immediately landed on the New York Times bestseller list. It was filled with dozens of design stories from cities around the world. Some were brand new stories, some were based on episodes of the show, and others grew out of 99 PI articles by the book's co-author, Kurt Colstad.
And the idea was to create a kind of field guide to the city. Not any particular city, but a guide to the underlying design principles of every city.
The book was called The Ninety Nine Percent Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. And I
Remember that subtitle took us like a whole lot of time to come up with. Oh yeah. Many phone calls were made. Much much was made of that. It was like hidden versus secret everyday versus ordinary. Exactly. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right.
And to launch the book, Kurt and I produced a special ninety nine PI episode made of short guidebook style entries recorded in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.
And now to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the book, we're going to share those stories again today. And with that, I'm gonna hand the mic back to the Roman Mars of five years ago from October of twenty twenty.
For the first time in a long time, I'm in our office in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. A couple people actually still work here. Two people can occupy the space without violating any social distancing guidelines. There's two entrances, there's two different bathrooms, there's two different kitchens. I usually work at home. But today I'm here because our first book, The 99% Invisible City, has just been released into the world. It's a guide to the city with stories and histories of the seemingly mundane things around you. My co-author Kurt Colstead and I are gonna use it to explore all the everyday objects right outside our own headquarters.
Before we even leave the office, just looking out the window, there's a brick building next door. And the tops of its walls are dotted with a bunch of square metal plates. These anchor plates are a few inches across, they're pretty thin, and they're spun in a bunch of different orientations. So Even though they're painted to blend in with a brick, once you notice them, they kinda stand out. And you could think of them like giant washers with bolts or rods tying them in into the bricks and helping brace them against the facade. And these ones happen to be square, but I've seen others in the neighborhood that are round or octagonal. In fact, anchor plates like this are pretty common in the Bay Area in part for seismic reasons.
They help make sure that loose bricks don't fall off buildings and hurt people during earthquakes. These particular ones are way up high where the walls overrun the roof. So there's a parapet up there where the bricks can't be braced against the main building. And so someone installed these and connected them to metal braces on the rooftop that you can't actually see from below. In other places though, you can see anchor plates all the way down a facade. And in those cases, they have a ton of work to do. They help hold up entire masonry walls that might otherwise be at risk of total collapse. In the book, we have an illustration with a bunch of different shapes that you can look out for in whatever city you're in.
There are squares and circles and stars and other geometric forms, but there are also some really ornate ones, like this huge curving S shape that holds up an old stone wall in Europe. But whether they look good or not so good, they've got a job to do, and they all look better than the alternative, which would be, of course, a pile of stones or bricks.
So if you walk outside of our building and look back, you will see a beautiful black ornate fire escape. I I love that we have a fire escape on our building. I know a couple people on the staff, they they climb out on it and watch the city at night. I never do that because I'm uh I'm a big chicken.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How did the 99 % Invisible City book launch and what’s its purpose?
0:00–11:55
2
What are anchor plates on brick façades and why are they important in the Bay Area?
11:55–23:40
3
How did fire escapes evolve and what role does hostile architecture play today?
23:40–34:06
4
Why do some storefront planters have hidden knobs and how does that relate to defensive design?
34:06–41:37