Shows / 99% Invisible
99% Invisible
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. From award winning producer Roman Mars. Learn more at 99percentinvisible.org.
Episodes
- 99% Invisible
Galloping Gertie
Even during the construction of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the slightest breeze. Construction…
- 99% Invisible
The Arsenal of Exclusion
“Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart” – Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities are great. They have…
- 99% Invisible
DeafSpace
The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence of sound that…
- 99% Invisible
Queue Theory and Design
In the US, it’s called a line. In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up. Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue. My friend Benjamen Walker is…
99% InvisibleThe Bathtubs or the Boiler Room
Tucked away in a basement mechanical room are two surviving marble bathtubs from a much more elaborate era of congressional life. Installed around 1860, the…
- 99% Invisible
US Postal Service Stamps
Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches, but you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make it work. -Ethel…
- 99% Invisible
Vulcanite Dentures
Before the 1850s, dentures were made out of very hard, very painful and very expensive material, like gold or ivory. They were a luxury item. The invention of…
- 99% Invisible
Immersive Ideal
Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to be Afraid) and their…
- 99% Invisible
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the 1950’s were…
- 99% Invisible
Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators
“There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators – those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and…
- 99% Invisible
Recognizably Anonymous
Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals who… have been…
- 99% Invisible
The Human-Human Interface
Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster show, Talk to Me…
- 99% Invisible
Billy Possum
It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was a cheap knock-off…
- 99% Invisible
The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet
United Nations Plaza sits in the center of San Francisco. Most people consider it a complete failure as a public space. Its central feature, at the entrance of…
- 99% Invisible
Darth Vader Family Courthouse
It’s hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles, abuse, divorce- and…
- 99% Invisible
Sound of Sport
If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job…
- 99% Invisible
The Steering Wheel
If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do it. Without having a…
- 99% Invisible
Super Bon Bonn
Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall, people immigrate and…
- 99% Invisible
Elegy for WTC
I want to be careful not to overstate what it means for a building to die. A building’s worth is an infinitesimal fraction of the worth a person’s life. Even…
- 99% Invisible
The Speed of Light for Building Pyramids
Last year, Steve Burrows CBE (Principle at the engineering consulting firm Arup) spent several weeks in Egypt studying the pyramids through the eyes of a…
- 99% Invisible
A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll
If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships, you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line. This marking is called the load line…
- 99% Invisible
Design for Airports
When I spoke with Allison Arieff about the design of airports, she said to me, if all airports simply played Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports…
- 99% Invisible
Feltron Annual Report
Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed stunning graphs…
- 99% Invisible
The Blue Yarn
In 1998 Dr. Gary Kaplan, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle received some bad news about his hospital. It was losing money. So Dr. Kaplan…
- 99% Invisible
Cul de Sac
When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort of like the mascot…
- 99% Invisible
Movie Title Sequences
More and more I’m finding that the first 2-3 minutes of a movie are my favorite part of the film. My life is devoted to the beautiful expression of…
- 99% Invisible
Bridge to the Sky
There are rules that dicate what you can build and how. Rules of physics and rules of men who sit on various bureaucratic boards and bodies. These rules…
- 99% Invisible
Chicago’s Jailhouse Skyscraper
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, is a federal jail right in the middle of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper, 27 stories, with…
- 99% Invisible
Unsung Icons of Soviet Design
There’s something that links most of the everyday objects presented in “Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.” But it’s hard to tell exactly what that…
99% InvisibleThe Capitol Columns
For more than a century, 24 massive sandstone columns stood along the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol, framing presidential inaugurations and helping define…
- 99% Invisible
You Are Listening To + Radio Net
youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is an intriguing, and…
- 99% Invisible
Free Speech Monument
In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate the 25th…
- 99% Invisible
BLDGBLOG: On Sound
Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise from the street and…
- 99% Invisible
Nikko Concrete Commando
In 2001, Delfin Vigil was walking the streets of San Francisco and ran across the name “Nikko” carved into the concrete sidewalk. After seeing Nikko once…
- 99% Invisible
RJDJ Reactive Music
This week, the radio audience heard episode #10, but for you web and podcast listeners, I have a story I did about a year and a half ago, about the reactive…
- 99% Invisible
Liberation Squares plus NY Dick
In a recent piece from Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti (Professor at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia…
- 99% Invisible
Check Cashing Stores
A few years ago, journalist Douglas McGray learned that the largest chain of check cashing stores in Southern California, Nix Check Cashing, was being bought…
- 99% Invisible
Concrete Furniture
The New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was the first modern, concrete, civic building in Toronto. When it opened in 1965, it stood out…
- 99% Invisible
A Designed Language
The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures could communicate…
- 99% Invisible
Sounds of the Artificial World
Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds are designed…
- 99% Invisible
Periodic Table
Everyone knows it when they see it. The classic “castle with turrets” periodic table is a beautiful and concise icon that contains a great deal of amazing…
- 99% Invisible
Game Over (Snap Judgment)
99% Invisible Extra! The tape rolls as we witness the tearful end of a perfect online world. This is a piece I did for Snap Judgment, based on a story from…
- 99% Invisible
13- Maps
I’m sorry, but if you don’t love maps, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Maps are amazing. They are art and story. A representation of where we are and…
- 99% Invisible
99% Guilt Free
“Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the negative impact to…
- 99% Invisible
99% Undesigned
Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful and will be…
- 99% Invisible
99% Sound and Feel
Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more preposterous…
- 99% Invisible
One Way Ticket To Mars
99% Invisible Extra! NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we leap to Mars, we might not make it back. This is…
- 99% Invisible
99% Private
Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but are mandated for…
- 99% Invisible
99% Free Parking
It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently unreliable meters. The…
- 99% Invisible
99% Alien
Humans need a few basic things to survive- air, water, food, heat, shelter- but just surviving isn’t really enough. We also need familiarity, a little comfort…
- 99% Invisible
99% Symbolic
Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn’t even know cities had their own flags. In Chicago, the city flag is everywhere. It’s incorporated into all different…
- 99% Invisible
99% Forgotten
At the top of Mt. Olympus in San Francisco, on what was once thought to be the geographic center of the city, is a pedestal for a statue that isn’t there…
- 99% Invisible
99% Details
It’s a stick with bristles poking out of it. It doesn’t even qualify as a simple machine, but the careful thought and design that went into the creation of the…
- 99% Invisible
99% Reality (only)
There’s not much that we can do about all the physical matter that’s been designed and built by someone else. It is the way it is. But with the advent of…
- 99% Invisible
99% 180
In the beginning, former AIA-SF president Henrik Bull and the Transamerica Pyramid did not get along. The building was an affront to late 1960’s modernist…
- 99% Invisible
99% Noise
This episode of 99% Invisible is all about acoustic design, the city soundscape, and how to make listening in shared spaces pleasant (or at the very least…
- 99% Invisible
99% Invisible: The Trailer
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the…