Roman MarsReseñas

This hit all my architecture and history geek needs. Chock full of facts, stories, and other interesting tidbits about our cities, towns, lands, etc. There is apparently a podcast which I've been missing and must now subscribe to. My only nitpick: I wish there were photos of the subjects rather than artwork/drawings; but I also understand it can be an artistic choice. I just found myself searching for photos of the actual object/item(s) being discussed so I could have a better mental image.

Otherwise, if you at all love history and/or architecture, this is a great book to own.

This is a really fun book on design and the built environment. It's organized as a staccato series of short interesting pieces, grouped by topic. You can pick it up and read for a few minutes, or for a few hours. Lots of useful trivia for your next walk around town with curious people.

I have never listened to the podcast. This is basically a collection of very loosely organised trivia. It's mostly pretty cool trivia! But I guess I was expecting more substance and discussion. The illustrations are also kind of a weird choice - lots of stuff really needs photos but they've got loads of good drawings which are impressive but a sort of inadequate substitute especially when they miss details. I'm mostly looking up stuff on my phone to see photos of what they talk about. Enjoying the trivia but don't really see this being more than a 3 star book. A lot of it feels like reading Wikipedia except less in depth and without helpful photos - the book is helpful in pointing you to things but I ended up looking stuff up even past the photos constantly because the book missed out stuff even on the basic level.

Also I always wonder to what extent I can trust the factual side when there's so many random facts from different areas being presented and when big issues get reduced to very short brief bits that don't even hint at the complicatedness behind them. Maybe that's kind of unfair - I guess it's just almost everything is at a shallow level like I say so it's not much more than trivia.

Overall it's fine and there's lots of interesting stuff mentioned but as a "field guide" it falls way short and I'm not sure whether the book has much advantage over Wikipedia.

Perfect accompaniment to the podcast. Lots of detail, lots of different little things they describe.

A great book to dip into. Almost every short article full of information or surprises or usually both.

I’m not an engineer - that’s my brother and my dad but an engineering friend recommended this book to me. The cover of the book initially drew me in but what got me to stay with the book was the easy to read stories within. Each chapter breaks down little things that we see within a city everyday but hardly ever pay attention to. I learned a lot and will keep my eye open as I am in a city to see what I can spot now.

This is a book that celebrates nerdiness - inherently, in its entire premise, literally, in it's dedication, and in spirit throughout the entire book. The authors are themselves nerds for their subject. Their enthusiasm and the joy they get from learning and sharing comes through in every essay, which in turn makes each essay a joy to read.

While I did find some essays more interesting than others - something that I suspect will be true for anyone who reads this book - every essay in the book was interesting to at least some degree.

I would call this book interesting, but not engrossing. The way that the book is organized both allows for and encourages skipping around from topic to topic by interest, which, given the focus on design throughout the book, is certainly no accident. This book would make a useful reference volume to have on the shelf, as well, and its size and design also reflect that.

The prose style was concise, casual, often humorous, and easy to follow. The format and structure of the book made it easy to read during small chunks of time, one essay at a time. Engineering and architectural terms were used throughout but always defined right after, and the same was true for any other technical terminology.

All in all, The 99% Invisible City is a fun and interesting reference book and a great place to start if you want to do more reading on urbanism, city engineering and design, or architecture, and I would recommend it not only to anyone interested in any of these topics, but also to anyone who is at least not not-interested in them. I think you'll be surprised how interesting a lot of it turns out to be.

The chapters are comprised of text & picture versions of the original on-line video podcasts, with additional material.
They give a fascinating view of the mundane details of cities and buildings.
I thought the earlier chapters were the best, in terms of interest and narrative.
The later chapters were more theoretical than actual, and began to stray into the author's ideological positions.

This book is a compilation of 1-4 page essays about aspects of our environment we usually take for granted. Some such as vents for underground structures, fake facades, wireless towers, emergency boxes, and boundary stones are invisible in that their function is camouflaged. However, most are visible but seldom occupy our thoughts (e. g., squirrels, traffic circles, tall buildings, freeways, divided highways, and boulevard trees).

The essays are grouped into six chapters that vary in heterogeneity and interest. The themes in each chapter are further subdivided. For example, the topics in the “Inconspicuous” chapter are titled “Ubiquitous,” “Camouflage,” and “Accretions.” The themes in the “Infrastructure” chapter are “Civic,” “Water,” “Technology,” “Roadways,” and “Public.” Most essays include nuggets of information about the subject’s history, evolution, and present status. Only a few include content that is likely to be entirely new to readers.

Some of the sections become tedious. For example, when camouflaged vents for sewer systems and tunnels are discussed, it’s not to continue with essays on similar camouflaged items. Illustrations are provided to elaborate many of the topics, but the judicious use of photographs would increase the clarity and interest in many instances.

This book is not one most readers will want to read like a novel, and I found it enjoyable to read an essay or two (i.e., 5-10 minutes) at a time. It’s a convenient time-filler for those occasions when you have a few minutes between activities. In that sense, it reminds me of The Book of Lists by Wallechinsky, Wallace and Wallace, and Guinness World Records.½

So I listened to the audiobook via audible and loved this. So many interesting tidbits (though I think maybe I’d liked it more if they did deeper dives into the subjects). I’d recognized one of the blank facades in NYC several years and had no idea what it was for. It was interesting to hear about preventing skateboarding (maybe it is a crime?) and the other efforts to green scape cities (and ask for forgiveness) and means to reduce automobile traffic in city centers.
I liked at the end of the audiobook how they discussed how different it was to compile a book as opposed to compiling a podcast. Wonder if they found doing an audiobook yet again something different?
Didn’t know before this that there was a podcast; am now subscribed. Where to begin with 450 episodes?

A bunch of nuggets about (mostly) urban design, from the boxes that let firefighters get into buildings without breaking doors to pigeon habitats; a little too sample-y for my tastes but it sounds like they go into more detail on the podcast.

A beautifully designed book for a wonderful podcast about design and architecture

I love everything about this book. As a fan of the podcast I was excited when I heard they were producing a book. It was nice to read some of the stories I already knew from listening to the podcast, as well as some new stories that were written especially for the book. I just know I will keep coming back to this book as a sort of reference manual to all the little details of the city.

It is written in bite-sized chunks. You can read the stories in any order or from cover to cover. The illustrations are wonderful. I love line drawings. Patrick Vale did a wonderful job rendering the objects and situations in the stories. I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in design or architecture.

Ben read (and read me the interesting bits) and I skimmed. The illustrations were good; I would have liked more of those (and charts and diagrams, etc.). There was a very handy page describing what type of street is a street/road/drive/avenue etc.

More of a neat coffee table reference than a straight read through. Tipperary Hill in Syracuse gets a shout out. Going to give the podcast a try.

This is a great audiobook which essentially extends the 99% Invisible podcast -- lots of brief stories about interesting and non-obvious facts about the built environment. Just enough detail to be interesting, while broad enough to have lots of interesting topics -- on topics which you might not think are very interesting, like signage standards, manhole cover designs, etc. Works particularly well as an audiobook (read by author) since he's basically a podcaster.

99% Invisible is one of my absolute favorite podcasts series. It focuses on "the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world," which sounds like a highly specific thing but actually leads to a wide diversity of fascinating topics. This book is a hand "field guide" to the little secrets of design you find in cities around the world. It includes many of the stories previously covered in podcast episodes as well as a lot of new material. You can read it straight through like I did, hop around the book at your leisure, or even just refer to it as a reference book.

Oddly fascinating topics you can learn about include:

• decoding the spray paint markings on pavement made by utility companies


• electrical substations disguised as ordinary houses


• seemingly useless architecture that is nevertheless maintained, known as "Thomassons"


• municipal flag design


• the Olympic history of those inflatable figures that dance outside of car washes


• the mysteries of rotaries/traffic circles


• boxes on the exterior of many buildings with emergency information for first responders


• an island named for Busta Rhymes


• synanthropes, or the animals who live among us (squirrels, fish, pigeons, racoons, etc.)


• hostile design the specifically targets "undesirable" people


• the story of a Buddha statue placed in an intersection to prevent littering that became a local shrine

All of this and more in this fascinating volume!

I've been a longtime listener of the 99% Invisible podcast, which explores odd and sometimes surprising stories about the human-built world around us and how it got that way. So, of course, I had to pick up this book, and I'm pleased to report that it did not disappoint! It's full of bite-sized tidbits about all kinds of weird, quirky, important, and overlooked stuff to be found in and around cities and roads. False building facades concealing ventilation shafts, skyscrapers with extra-high towers at the top just so they could claim to be the world's tallest building for a brief moment, coded signs in Hollywood that point to movie shooting locations, brick thieves in St. Louis, spikes on sidewalks to keep homeless people away, parking spaces repurposed into mini-parks... And on and on and on.

The whole thing is engaging and fun to read, whether you want to dip in and out or read it straight through, and whether you actually live in a city or not. And the book itself is a nice, solid, rather attractive physical object. With the holiday season coming up, it occurs to me that it might make a really nice gift for the sort of person who likes non-fiction books that make you want to go around saying, "Hey, did you know...?" to people.

Admittedly, a fair amount of it was already familiar to me from the podcast -- more than I was expecting, to be honest -- but I found I didn't particularly mind. It's still interesting the second time, and they're never just transcribing stories verbatim from the podcast. Plus, there's plenty that was new to me, too.

My only dissatisfaction with it is that I really wish it had photographs. There are lots of black-and-white line drawings, which have a certain charm, and which do help to illustrate some of the things that need illustrating, but it was occasionally frustrating not to be able to just see real examples of the things the book was describing.

I originally started by describing The 99% Invisible City in the context of the 99% Invisible podcast. But if you already know the podcast you already know if you want this book. For everyone else Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt provide a field guide to all of the interesting bits you probably never notice, or at least don't think on much, about cites, how they work and how they got that way. It's not just a rehashing of the podcast (although fans will recognize some of the stories). Nor is it stuff you're just going to find on google or wikipedia because, well, you can find that on google and wikipedia. (Although I'm sure people are busily adding all the interesting bits from the book to wikipedia already). You can find out about stop signs, but not "why are they red?" because that is kind of boring, but how did they come to be standardized and why someone once thought that we would be able to derive instant meaning from the number of sides on a sign. Or about that one traffic light that has green at the top, and the park next to it to commemorate how it got that way.

The book is organized into 6 chapters, and each of those into 3-6 sub-chapters that contain a handful of vignettes each. There is absolutely no need to read them in order. This is the perfect book for
* someone who enjoys not just random facts, but the human stories that go with those facts
* someone who is interested in opening their eyes to all the little things all around us in the city
* someone who likes to puzzle out how any why things are the way they are, and loves the surprise of finding out that an everyday thing is an elegant and subtle way to solve a problem
* anyone who always reads the plaque.

And as you might expect from a book by a couple of design nerds, the book itself is an exercise in meticulous design.It looks and feels like one of those Intro to Blah college textbooks, except one you'll want to read. The illustrations are generally photographs that have been re-rendered as drawings to highlight the important, relevant, or interesting bits.

I found this book to be fascinating! So many little tidbits to be discovered. From subjects as different as the meanings of those little colored paint markings you find on your road, to big things like decisions in historic preservation. It just amazed me as to how my eyes have been opened to so many things in the city that I never knew, or even thought about.
And it's the type of book that you can read a page or two at your leisure, set the book down, and come back a week later and read a couple more pages. Told in easy to understand language, laced with cute line drawings, and highly educational.
A great book to increase all of our situational awareness of our surroundings.