99% @rch

Chicago's biggest design achievement probably isn’t one of its amazing skyscrapers, but the Chicago River, a waterway disguised as a remnant of the natural landscape. But it isn't natural, not really. It’s hard to tell when you see the river, but it’s going the wrong way. It should flow into Lake Michigan, but instead fresh water from Lake Michigan flows backwards, into the city. The Chicago River is, in large part, a carefully-designed extension of the city’s sewer system. 

Reporter Dan Weissmann talked with Richard Cahan (author of "The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond") about the amazing lengths the city went to, over the course of several decades, to carry away the sewage that threatened to drown Chicago.

99% Invisible-86- Reversal Of Fortune

If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff.

Neff wasn't just an architect--he was a starchitect. One of his most famous projects was the renovation of  Pickfair, the estate owned by the iconic silent film actress Mary Pickford, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks. When the couple moved into Pickfar, the house sat on a nameless street in an empty neighborhood called Beverly Hills. If you were lucky enough to be invited to dinner at Pickfair you might find yourself seated next to Babe Ruth, the King of Spain or Albert Einstein. Life magazine called Pickfair “only slightly less important than the white house, and much more fun.” Neff designed estates for Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Groucho Marx. His Libby Ranch is now owned by Reese Witherspoon.

But at the end of his life, Wallace Neff lived in a 1,000 square foot concrete bubble. And Neff believed that this simple dome was his greatest architectural achievements.

Los Angeles-based reporter David Weinberg spoke with historian Jeffrey Head, author of No Nails, No Lumber: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff.  David also spoke with Kathy Miles, who grew up in Igloo Village; Steve Roden, an artist and current resident of the last remaining bubble house in the US; and architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who has his practice in a classic Spanish/Mediterranean-style Wallace Neff building.

We also hear from Dakar-based producer Juliana Friend, who was nice enough to go check on the bubbles over there.

A different version of this story originally aired on KCRW as part of their Independent Producer Project.

David Weinberg is also the brains behind Random Tape, an audio experiment in, well, random tape.

99% Invisible-89- Bubble Houses

FOREST TO DESERT by Sarah Boothroyd
2008
Stereo
2 minutes 35 seconds
------------------------------
An audio doodle about this phrase: "Humankind is preceded by forest, and followed by desert."

www.sarahboothroyd.com

Copyright: All Rights Reserved

Forest to Desert

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

99% Invisible-02- 99% 180

99% Invisible-26- Chicago's Jailhouse Skyscraper

What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building?

The hotel on the very prominent corner of Touhy and Kilbourn Avenues in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town’s most famous building: The first Hyatt hotel in all of Chicagoland, premiere accommodations, top-notch restaurant. It was swank! Roberta Flack stayed there. Barry Mannilow stayed there. Perry Como. Michael Jordon stayed there on his first night in Chicago. Every thirteen year old in the area had their bar mitzvah there.

Then, slowly, over time, it became Lincolnwood’s most infamous building. Changed hands, got seedy and run down. It was the home of the Midwest Fetish Fair and Marketplace convention. There were drug-fueled sex parties attended by shady Chicago politicians later convicted of things like extortion. And of course there was the convicted mobster Alan Dorfman, who was gunned down in the parking lot. It’s now dilapidated and empty.

But even if you know nothing about the history, everyone in the area knows this hotel.

Because it’s purple. Really, really purple.  

Gwen Macsai grew up nearby and she always thought it was really, really ugly. Lots of people did. To be fair, lots of people didn’t. But everyone has an opinion about it. 

But Gwen Macsai, host of Re:sound from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, has a secret about the Purple Hotel.

Gwen talks to the original architect of the Purple Hotel, plus critic Lee Bey, developer Jack Weiss, and the new architect, Jackie Koo, who’s looking to bring the Purple Hotel back to its former glory.


99% Invisible-58- Purple Reign

Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.

By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000).  That's a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile.  For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.  

To put it another way, think about living in a 1,200 square foot home.  Then imagine yourself living with 9 other people.  Then imagine that your building is only one unit of a twelve-story building, and every other unit is as full as yours.  Then imagine hundreds those buildings crammed together in a space the size of four football fields.

We can't really imagine it, either.

Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China.  In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories.  But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.  

Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority.  This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people.  Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out.  Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution.  It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees.  And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.  

They built the city building by building, first blanketing the area of the fort, then building vertically. Buildings were packed together so tightly in the Walled City that the alleys were nearly pitch-black in the day time.  Electricity and water were brought in by illegal or informal means.  

The Walled City gained a reputation as a sort of den of iniquity--there were high levels of prostitution, gambling, mafia activity, and, for some reason, rampant unlicensed dentistry.

But an order did emerge.  The Walled City had no schools, but there was an informal kindergarten.  A resident's organization settled disputes.  And there was lots of industry: a fishball factory, a noodle factory, metalworking shops, a textile mill.  There were stores, restaurants.  You could even receive mail in the Walled City.

Kowloon Walled City was torn down in 1993.  Today, it's a park, and most traces of the city are gone. But the memory of the city lives on.  It was featured in the non-verbal film Baraka, plays a cameo role in Bloodsport. It's also served as the setting in a number of video games, including most recently Call of Duty: Black Ops

This week's episode was produced by Nick van der Kolk.  He spoke with photographer Greg Girard and architect Aaron Tan, who both spent time in the Walled City.  Nick also talked to as Brian Douglas, who helped design Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Nick is the director of the award-winning podcast, Love + Radio.  You can also hear him over at Snap Judgment.



99% Invisible-66- Kowloon Walled City

I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them? 

You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.

Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Schafer at Ohio State asked students from many different parts of the country this question and the most common response was that the white stripes are two feet long.

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the brilliant book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reveals the real answer and some of the other perceptual countermeasures that are designed to make you feel comfortable going way faster than your brain can adequately process. 

We also talk about how this design language of exaggerated scale and wide vistas is great for limited access highways, but it’s problematic when these features are grafted onto suburban landscapes where they don’t belong. 

All the music in this episode is courtesy of my favorite new label, the Utah based, Hel Audio. Specifically, we played the bands OK Ikumi and Mooninite. Hel Audio focuses on physical releases of electronic and experimental music. I just bought myself the full Hel Audio catalog on four glorious cassette tapes, along with less glorious but more versatile (and free) digital downloads of the same songs. The tape deck in my twelve-year-old Golf has never been happier. http://www.helaudio.org/


99% Invisible-68- Built for Speed

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city--until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.

But like most legends, the one that Eric heard about the Red Car is not entirely accurate. It's true that Los Angeles did have an extensive mass transit system called the Red Car, which at one time ran on 1,100 miles of track--about 25 percent more more track mileage than New York City has today, a century later.  

But the Red Car wasn't the victim of a conspiracy. The Red Car WAS the conspiracy. 


99% Invisible-70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy

Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park.  With its sleek granite benches, geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement, its success as a pedestrian plaza is debatable.  But it turned out to be perfect for skateboarding.  As skateboarding culture grew in the 1990s, LOVE Park became a Mecca of the skating world--even though skateboarding was officially banned there.  

Skateboarder and radio producer Andrew Norton takes us for a ride through the surprising history of LOVE Park, and pulls back the curtain on a decades-old battle over public space in Philadelphia and beyond.


99% Invisible-71- In and Out of LOVE

Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part:  The Old Town.
Walking through this historic district, it’s just like any other quaint European city.  There are tourist shops, horse-drawn carriage rides, church spires. The buildings are beautiful--but they are not original.  
During World War II, Nazi forces razed more than 80% of Warsaw.  After Soviet troops took over, much of the city was rebuilt in the with communist style: fast, cheap, and big.  They built apartment blocks, wide avenues, and heavy grey buildings.  It was communist ideology in architectural form.
But when it came to the historic district of Warsaw-- the Old Town and a long connecting section called the Royal Route--they decided not just to rebuild, but to restore.  Builders would use the same stones, and use special kilns to make special bricks to preserve its authenticity.  After six years of reconstruction, the new Old Town was opened.  Poles were ecstatic to have it back.  Even in the West, it was seen as a triumph of the human spirit. 
But here's the thing: Warsaw’s historic Old Town is not a replica of the original. It’s a re-imagining. An historic city that never really was. 
Reporters and producers Amy Drozdowska and Dave McGuire talk with social anthropologist Michael Murawski about the fake recreation of Old Town and what it means to modern Warsaw.


99% Invisible-72- New Old Town

Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California--if you know where to look--you'll find public, outdoor staircases.

The large number of hidden public staircases is part of what makes California so great.  Charles Fleming is one of the world experts of coastal California's public stairs. He has documented and mapped walking routes through nearly every useable public staircase in San Francisco's East Bay, as well as in Los Angeles (where he lives).  Charles published his findings in two walking guides, appropriately titled Secret Stairs.

Producer Sam Greenspan met with Charles in the Pacific Palisades, where people from all over Los Angeles had gathered to attend one of Charles' monthly stair walks.

99% Invisible-75- Secret Staircases

On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”

And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.

Many viewed the car as a death machine. One newspaper cartoon even compared the car to Moloch, the god to whom the Ammonites supposedly sacrificed their children.

At first, pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Parades were held in dozens of cities to commemorate the dead children. Cities built monuments. Mothers of children killed in the streets are given a special White Star to honor their loss.

The main cause for these deaths was that the rules of the street were vastly different than they are today. A street functioned like a city park, or a pedestrian mall, where you could move in any direction without really thinking about it. The only moving hazards were animals and other people.  

But automotive interests wanted to claim the streets for cars. 
So they put forth a radical idea--cars weren't to blame, it was human recklessness. They found that they could exonerate the machine by placing the blame on individuals. 

They also coined a new term: "Jaywalking."

99% @rch

G urbarc