I am a big fan of the podcast 99% Invisible so when they announced a little while ago that they would be writing a book, I was very excited and preordered it right away. The book finally finished up over the summer and it has taken me a while to go through it, but I ended up loving how you can read and absorb it over time. The book consists of short articles about different aspects of city design, along with really cute hand drawn illustrations of the infrastructure they discuss. You can read it cover to cover, which I did, or you can treat it like a reference book and read individual sections at a time. Either way, you are almost guaranteed to learn something new.
During the lead up to the publication something that Mars mentioned was that this book turned into the book of the moment with the pandemic and lockdown restrictions. Instead of exploring far away places, readers could now explore the design within the architecture surrounding them and learn something new about the city that they reside in. Which is pretty cool, as fans of the podcast already know.
I really enjoyed going through this book. A lot of the chapters were taken from the podcast, but since they had to be recast into a new form, the story has changed somewhat. And there were plenty of new stories that are new entirely! One of my favorites is about sidewalk graffiti and how construction workers mark the location of different underground lines on the concrete to know where to dig. Because how many of us have seen those mark and wondered about them?
So if you are into architecture and design, or just like me
and enjoy picking up bits of random knowledge, this is definitely a book to
have around. It explains things around you that you have noticed and wondered
about, as well as the things around you that you never noticed and now can’t
stop seeing.
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