Seeing what architects, designers and engineers see
There’s deep Chicago roots — and favorite buildings — in the finest podcast around, ‘99% Invisible’
Maybe this is arguable, but objectively, without argument, the greatest podcast that ever was, and ever has been in the 20-year history of commercial podcasting , is “99% Invisible.”
It is “The Wire” of podcasting, it is the “What’s Going On” of podcasting, it is the Pringles of podcasting — you get a taste, that taste becomes hard to quit, and pretty soon you’re floating, blathering on about transcendence. Meanwhile, the work itself, the actual podcast, is mild-mannered, almost deceptively straightforward.
Across a decade now, after more than 430 episodes, “99% Invisible” still explains itself as a podcast about design. Which, as the cliché goes, is like saying “Moby-Dick” is a novel about whales.
“99% Invisible,” episode after episode, is really about the difference between what you see and a designer sees, what you see and an architect sees, what you see and an engineer sees. And they see a lot.
“The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design” (October 2020, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the new bestselling book by host Roman Mars, boils down the podcast’s roving eye to the urban. Drawing on past episodes, it covers bike lanes, manhole covers, the sidewalk hieroglyphics of city engineers, the Jeffersonian Grid and that little guy on crosswalk signals — it’s a nice walk through the show’s range.
But the show goes far deeper — into radiators and gendered bathrooms, movie novelizations and tea bags, rumble strips and the history of cruise control. Its scope is so expansive that Chicago-centric