99% Invisible - First 40 Episodes

A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

99% Invisible-20- Nikko Concrete Commando

99% Invisible-21- BLDGBLOG  On Sound

99% Invisible-23- You Are Listening To + Radio Net

99% Invisible-24- The Capitol Columns

99% Invisible-25- Unsung Icons of Soviet Design

99% Invisible-26- Chicago's Jailhouse Skyscraper

99% Invisible-27- Bridge to the Sky

A tiny radio show about design, architecture &amp; the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.


99% Invisible-28- Movie Title Sequences

99% Invisible-29- Cul de Sac

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 started studying how other hospitals were being run to see if there was a better way to manage his hospital. He scoured the country, looking for a hospital with a management system worth adopting, but he never found one. Instead he ended up in Japan. At a Toyota factory. 
When Dr. Kaplan told his staff they would be changing everything about the way they operate and the changes were based on a car company and that doctors and nurses should refer to their new teachers as “sensei,” the response was less than ideal. 
This entire, multiyear overhaul started with a ball of blue yarn. The staff met with a Toyota Production System sensei and he took out the ball of blue yarn and a map of the hospital and told the staff to trace the path a cancer patient would take on a typical visit for chemotherapy treatment. When they were finished, it was an immensely powerful visual experience for everyone in the room. They all stared at this map with blue yarn snaking all over the place, doubling back on itself and making complicated twists and turns from one end of the building to the other. They understood for the first time that they were taking their sickest patients, for whom time was their most precious resource, and they were wasting huge amounts of it.


99% Invisible-30- The Blue Yarn

Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed stunning graphs and maps and created concise infographics that detail that year’s activities. The results were originally intended for his friends and family, but the “personal annual reports” have found an audience with fellow designers and people that really geek out on seeing lots of data, beautifully presented.

In 2010, Nicholas Felton’s father passed away, and Felton decided to turn his annual report into a full biography of his father.  He took 4,348 of his father’s personal records and created an intimate portrait of a man using only the data he left behind.

I produced this story with Nate Berg, who is an awesome freelance journalist and blogger at Planetizen (a site you should add to your daily routine). 


99% Invisible-31- The Feltron Annual Report

When I spoke with Allison Arieff about the design of airports she said to me, if all airports simply played Brian Eno’s album Music for Airports over the speakers, every airport would be better. I say this to serve not only as an introduction to Allison Arieff, but also so you’ll know that she is someone whose judgment is perfectly true.

Using the new T2 terminal at SFO as an example, Allison Arieff of the New York Times talks us through some of the considerations that go into designing an airport terminal, how the priorities have changed since 9/11, and how architects struggle to keep pace with ever-changing technology. 


99% Invisible-32- Design for Airports

If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line- this simple marking is called the load line, or as I prefer, the Plimsoll line- and not to oversell it, but this elegant graphic design has saved thousands of lives. Tristan Cooke (http://Humansindesign.tumblr.com) tells us the history of the Plimsoll line and explains why it's one of his favorite examples of design.

99% Invisible-33- A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll

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 modern day structural engineer. The result, which was presented in a documentary for the Discovery Channel and published in an article for Design Intelligence, presented fascinating insights into the design of the pyramids and offers some lessons in how we may think about sustainability through longevity in modern architecture.

Burrows’ research reveals that some of the same practical considerations that structural engineers and architects contend with today, may have driven all the major decisions about the design and construction of the Giza Pyramids.

99% Invisible-34- The Speed of Light for Building Pyramids

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 two buildings don’t even move the needle in comparison to real human loss. But a building is still a living thing in a way. It breathes and it moves. This movement makes a sound.

Les Robertson, the structural engineer of the World Trade Center, says that the people working inside the tower couldn’t feel this movement, but they could hear it.

This episode of 99% Invisible was produced with the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, and the creaking “Buildings Speak” section was mixed by Jim McKee of Earwax Productions. It’s comprised of extracts and outtakes from the Peabody Award Winning Sonic Memorial Project produced in 2002. A new, tenth anniversary edition of the Sonic Memorial Project, which is narrated by my literary hero Paul Auster, is going to be playing on public radio stations around the country. Find out where and when it’s playing on your local public radio station and make an appointment to listen. 



99% Invisible-35- Elegy for WTC

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 emigrate, but most of these changes happen over decades. What happens to a city when its purpose is stripped away virtually overnight? Bonn was the quiet, unlikely capital of West Germany and then the newly unified Germany for 50 years, and then the Cold War ended and the seat of government was moved back to its historic home of Berlin. Ten years after the move, Bonn is finding its new identity and purpose, but hidden clues in the urban landscape remind us of the city it used to be.
Cyrus Farivar takes us on a tour of his neighborhood in what used to be the diplomatic quarter of Bonn with local historian and tour guide Michael Wenzel. Farivar is the science and technology editor at Deutsche Welle English and the author of The Internet of Elsewhere – about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world.


99% Invisible-36- Super Bon Bonn

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 button to push, you could close your eyes and pretend push a button, and that action would accurately reflect the action of pushing a real button. The same goes for flipping a switch or turning a door knob. If you closed your eyes and faked the movement, it would sync up with its real world use.
Now if I asked you to do the same with a car’s steering wheel, you’d think you’d be able to describe steering accurately and mime the correct movements with your hands in the air, but you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. You’d probably kill a bunch of imaginary people.
Our friends at Humans in Design, Tristan Cooke and Tom Nelson, bring us this story about how our brain knows how to steer without really knowing how to steer and what that means for steering wheel design. They interviewed Dr. Steve Cloete, from The University of Queensland, who conducted the blind driver studies.


99% Invisible-37- The Steering Wheel

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, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. This episode of 99% Invisible is produced by Peregrine Andrews for Falling Tree Productions. It is an extract from a much longer, and really stunning doc called “The Sound of Sport.” 

99% Invisible-38- Sound of Sport

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 if you were to design a place to reflect and amplify that misery, not mitigate it, it'd probably take the form of the old New York County Family Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

The original shiny black cube, built in 1975, was referred to as the “Darth Vader building” by court employees (presumably after 1977). The foreboding and intimidating structure is primarily criticized in relation to its function as a family courthouse, which should strive to inspire a feeling of trust, authority, and (one hopes) inclusion.

The building was remodeled in 2006. The bones are largely the same, but the shiny, black cladding is gone, replaced by a more conventional grey/beige. The problematic entrance to the building has been completely opened up, making ingress and egress a much less daunting proposition. To quote our 99% Invisible reporter this week, Brett Myers, “walking into the building is no longer like being consumed by a beast.”  

But a little something was lost in the facelift. The original building was definitely not boring and commanded your attention. I don’t know if the same can be said for the current design. Modern design principles and cultural preservation are not necessarily at loggerheads, but when they do come into conflict, it’s not always easy answer which ideology should win.


99% Invisible-39- Darth Vader Family Courthouse

In the center of San Francisco, there is a plaza with no benches. Its central feature at the entrance of the plaza is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprin in 1975.The water shoots out at various angles, from inside a sunken pit, filled with large granite slabs. It’s a design that kind of pulls you in and invites you to take the steps down to the water and climb in between the hulking stones. And that’s part of the problem.
In 2004, radio producer Ben Temchine, created a really fantastic documentary of UN Plaza, called “The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet” that first aired on my first radio program called Invisible Ink in May of 2004. (Yep another "invisible" show)
The documentary really takes a hard look at UN Plaza when it was really at its worst and asks the question, is there a point where good the intentions and idealism of a design become so removed from reality, that it actually borders on negligence?


99% Invisible - First 40 Episodes

Duncan Howsley