Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design Hardcover – Illustrated, October 6, 2020
Purchase options and add-ons
“[A] diverse and enlightening book . . . The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t see, see but don’t know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific.”
—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff, Grunt, and Gulp
“The 99% Invisible City brings into view the fascinating but often unnoticed worlds we walk and drive through every day, and to read it is to feel newly alive and aware of your place in the world. This book made me laugh, and it made me cry, and it reminded me to always read the plaque.”
—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All The Way Down
A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast
Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?
Or stopped to consider why you don't see metal fire escapes on new buildings?
Or pondered the story behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?
99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.
Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDey Street Books
- Publication dateOctober 6, 2020
- Dimensions7 x 1.33 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100358126606
- ISBN-13978-0358126607
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt
When did you first decide to write The 99% Invisible City?
In 2014, the very first time Kurt and I met, we talked about working on a book involving design and cities. Publishers had asked me before about expanding 99% Invisible into printed media, but I was too busy with weekly episodes, and Kurt was occupied with writing daily articles. After Kurt joined the show in 2015, 99% Invisible continued to grow and we increasingly felt the need to distill the best of our combined years of research, knowledge and experience into a single book, sharing our passion for cities in a distinct standalone volume. In 2018, we began to outline the shape this would take.
Why did you decide to write a 99% Invisible book?
In some sense, the story of this book dates back to, or even beyond, the origin of 99% Invisible. This book brings together my years of design storytelling, including hundreds of interviews with urbanists and designers, and Kurt’s years of studying urban design and architecture, as well as his experiences as a designer and design writer. Together, we decided to create a volume that would accessible and universal—a guide that would engage more than just urbanists, architects, and 99PI fans.
The concept of a field guide seemed like a fun and effective way to organize our thoughts. With that driving idea in mind, we began to compile compelling narratives and intriguing characters. We singled out individual stories that would captivate an audience but that would also fit together and flow, forming a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. This book would encourage readers to look at all different aspects of cities—from individual objects, buildings, blocks to entire neighborhoods—in an entirely new light. Through many smaller narratives, the book tells a larger story of how to be more observant and thoughtful citizens.
What kind of research went into writing this book?
This book is the culmination of years of research, travel and storytelling. It grew out of interactions with many different urbanists and designers, from an interview with a US postal worker at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to a producer visit to the tuned mass damper at the top of Taipei’s tallest skyscraper. The book draws on local reporting from 99PI producers around the world as well as extensive research done specifically for this volume. Through all these interactions, we wove together the most interesting personalities encountered and tales uncovered into a dense but delightful volume.
What cities/regions are featured in The 99% Invisible City?
The book is not a guide to any one city, but to all cities; we wanted a subject of interest in one place to open up a door to understanding many others. Often, this meant taking the audience somewhere unexpected. Rather than visiting the site of the first US electric traffic signal in Cleveland, OH, for instance, readers are sent on a journey to Syracuse, NY, home to the country’s only upside-down signal (with a green light on top). From there, the story travels halfway around the world to Japan, where “grue” traffic lights illuminate the strange relationship between cities, design standards and the way different languages evolve to describe colors.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t see, see but don’t know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific.”
—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff, Grunt, and Gulp
“The 99% Invisible City brings into view the fascinating but often unnoticed worlds we walk and drive through every day, and to read it is to feel newly alive and aware of your place in the world. This book made me laugh, and it made me cry, and it reminded me to always read the plaque.”
—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All The Way Down
“The Invisible City is not a book, but a pair of magic glasses that transform the mundane city around you into a vibrant museum of human ingenuity.”
—Justin McElroy, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Adventure Zone
“We usually define cities in terms of their bigness, so it’s easy to forget that our daily experience of any city is made up of countless tiny, intimate encounters. Just as Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago, Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt provide a new way of seeing urban life, finding secrets and surprises behind every sewer grate, storefront, and street sign.”
—Michael Bierut, design critic and author of How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World
“The ideal companion for city buffs, who’ll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Conversational, bite-size entries [and] beautiful tricolor illustrations . . . A field guide for anywhere.”
—Booklist
About the Author
KURT KOHLSTEDT is the digital director and producer of 99% Invisible. Before joining the show, he founded a series of successful online magazines on cities and design, starting with WebUrbanist in 2007. He holds a graduate degree in architecture from the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments.
Product details
- Publisher : Dey Street Books; Illustrated edition (October 6, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0358126606
- ISBN-13 : 978-0358126607
- Item Weight : 2.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.33 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Design History & Criticism
- #6 in Trivia & Fun Facts (Books)
- #9 in Trivia (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Roman Mars is the host and creator of 99% Invisible, an award-winning podcast about design and architecture. With over 450 million downloads, 99% Invisible is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Fast Company named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in 2013. He was a TED main stage speaker in 2015. It is currently the most popular TED Talk about design with over 6 million views. His crowd funding campaigns have raised over $5 million and he's the highest-funded journalist in Kickstarter history. He is also a co-founder of Radiotopia, a collective of ground-breaking independent podcasts.
Kurt Kohlstedt is a writer and editor at 99% Invisible, a radio show and website about design. With over 400,000,000 downloads to date, 99pi is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Kurt has gone on tour with the show, given talks and participated in panels on various subjects from how Kindergartens shaped Modern art and design to creative adaptive reuse strategies for big-box stores.
In 2007, Kurt founded WebUrbanist, the first in a series of online urban architecture, art and design and publications that would go on to reach hundreds of millions of readers over the decade that followed.
Previously, Kurt studied philosophy (BA) at Carleton College before completing a graduate degree in architecture (M. Arch) at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. Over the years, he has worked on industrial, theatrical, furniture, graphic and web design projects and tends to tweet about cities, design and synanthropes. More at kurtkohlstedt dot com
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
FIrst, it's illustrated only by what some reviewers call "beautiful line drawings" by Patrick Vale. The drawings are functional in several ways. They are much more legible on my classic black-and-white e-Ink technology KIndle. And because they are drawings, they can illustrate things very clearly in a small space. In some cases, the drawings seem "clever" and "clear." In other cases, I regret to say, they just seem "crude."
Consider the beautifully painted manhole covers of Osaka Japan. They are works of art. They are in color, they are delicate, and they are immensely varied. What kind of nut thinks you can convey this adequately in a single black-and-white sketch of one of them? No words, however eloquent, can make up for it. I don't know what constraints led to this decision, but it sucks. I need to read this book with a tablet next to me, and make web searches as I read each page in order to see adequate images of the things the book is describing. In this case, a decent minimum would six to twelve full-color images.
Second, the title promises a "field guide." It isn't. There is no way you can look at something weird in the urban landscape, go to the book and identify it. It doesn't even attempt to provide one. At least one website classifies it as a "reference work." It isn't. It's a great read, like a book by Bill Bryson or John McPhee, but it is no field guide.
Third, I haven't tried to collate the chapter titles against the podcast episode titles, but rather a lot of the essays are based on topics that have been the subject of "99% Invisible" podcast episodes. If you are a regular follower of the podcast, as I am, a lot of this material will seem familiar.
1)Bite-size, 1-2 page articles mean the readings in this book are accessible to more people than they would otherwise. I can't speak for those with ADHD or those who grew up on the internet, but for those with affective disorders that disturb their concentration this book IS accessable, albeit one segment of a section at a time. I am currently up to "Lines of Sight"
2)The illustrations are fun. They might be frustrating at times when you can't find the relevant pictures in them, but I don't think this is a book I'm going to read only once. I'll find everything at some point.
3)Basic layout of the book is *smart*. I just realized it has not only a very well organized TOC, and fairly comprehensive index, but also an interesting-looking bibliography.
4)While it's not leather-bound or anything, it has a full-color print wrap on the hard cover which is just another element of the 99% Invisible Class & Style.
5) People (Kurt and Roman?) have been saying it's NOT a 99% Invisible episode in book form, but I think maybe it could be argued that it is a superlong book-format episode on the theme of CITIES.
6) If nothing else, it translates the *spirit* of 99% Invisible (bringing all design and architecture that shape our world into our POV) (in a flawless execution) perfectly.
*Was considering complaining about the partial bookcover here but since I always remove them to shove in the back or at best use as bookmarks, and this one is the ideal size to use as a bookmark I literally have NOTHING to complain about.
The book itself is gorgeous. It feels sturdy and smooth and the half book jacket design with the front cover is *chefs kiss*. Its writing has not lost the feel of the audio show— just as fun and playful, it doesnt adhere to the often closed & boring nature of not spoken writing. It only makes me want to get the audiobook as well!
Ive been carrying it around with me and enjoy reading a snippet, a small section when i have some free time at work or waiting for a friend on the bayou. I have so many friends who want to borrow it, but i love it so much i dont want it to not have it!
Top reviews from other countries
Wanting to head out for a 99% invisible design Safari into the city… with this beast in my backpack feels slightly disconnected rather than having it as a pocket book for example. Good for in the house but not as a field guidebook.
All in all love the style though.
For those who are unfamiliar with the podcast, you are in for a treat! The 99% Invisible City explores in easily-digestible shortish texts various facts about urban design, and probably things you didn't know were... Things!
The book is separated in short articles, with accompanying stunning illustrations. Even the sleeve works into the design of the book, acting like a guide to the various components that make up the covert art.
This book will make you take a second look to things in your own city. You'll try to spot things, or try to understand why things were made a certain way; what was the process that lead to a particular piece of equipment, or shape, to become the way it is!
I heartily recommend The 99% Invisible City!
Toen tijdens de podcast werd aangegeven dat ze een boek zouden uitbrengen, ter ondersteuning van de podcasr, heb ik deze meteen vooruit besteld.
Echter onverwacht was het boek veel meer dan een ondersteuningsproject, maar een volwaardig boek waar ik al met veel genot grotere stukken heb gelezen.
De illustraties zorgen voor nog meer duidelijkheid.
Kortom, ook als je de podcast nog niet volgt is dit boek zeker een aanrader waar je veel plezier van gaat hebben.