At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today only about a mile is left standing.

Compared with other famous walls in history, this wall had a pretty short life span.

The Great Wall of China has been around for 2500  years. So have the walls of ancient Babylon—although its most famous part, the Ishtar Gate, is actually in a museum in Berlin.

But even though the wall dividing Berlin into East and West was only up for 30 years, it had a huge impact on the psyche of the city. It broke families in two. In the decade that followed, more than 2 million people fled from east to west. East Germany was losing its most skilled workers as they sought jobs--and to reunite with their families--across the border. And East Germany was losing face with every East Berliner who chose to defect.

And that’s why, in 1961, East Germany closed its border to West Berlin with a wall. But this isn’t a story about the design of the Berlin Wall. This is a story about one design to get through it—or really, underneath it. Ralph Kabisch, then a 20-something-year-old university student, was there.

99% Invisible- 104- Tunnel 57

When it was built in1977, Citicorp Center  (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world. You can pick it out of the New York City skyline  by its 45-degree angled top.
But it's the base of the building that really makes the tower so unique. The bottom nine of its 59 stories are stilts. 
This thing does not look sturdy. But it has to be sturdy. Otherwise they wouldn't have built it this way. 
Right?
The architect of Citicorp Center was Hugh Stubbins, but most of the credit for this building is given to its chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier.
According to LeMessurier, in 1978 he got a phone call from an undergraduate architecture student making a bold claim about LeMessurier's building. He told LeMessurier that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind.

99% Invisible-110- Structural Integrity

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

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-03- 99% Reality (only)

99% Invisible-06- 99% Symbolic

99% Invisible-15- Sounds of the Artificial World

99% Invisible-18- Check Cashing Stores

99% Invisible-20- Nikko Concrete Commando

99% Invisible-29- Cul de Sac

Hanging in the garage of Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, there’s a small, pear-shaped light bulb. It is glowing right now.
This lightbulb has been glowing, with just a couple of momentary interruptions, for 113 years. You can see it glow in real time.
The bulb is a genuine heirloom from the dawn of electric illumination, built by one of its pioneers: Adolphe Chaillet.

99% Invisible-144- There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

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

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform twelve autopsies; on more hectic day, they might do more than twenty.

But there’s one room on the fourth floor that sits apart from the buzz of normal activity. It feels a bit like an art gallery.

This room houses the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.”

99% Invisible-165- The Nutshell Studies

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

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

The largest body of water in California was formed by a mistake. In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge depression in the Sonora Desert, creating an enormous salty lake called the Salton Sea. The water is about twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The ground beneath the southern end of the sea is volcanic and water bubbles to the surface in muddy pools. The only fish that can live in Salton Sea are tilapia, but even they struggle to survive. This sea—this gurgling, sometimes stinky, accident of a sea—is actually in danger of drying up and disappearing. And you may be thinking: "good riddance!" It doesn’t sound all that nice. But the Salton Sea needs us. And we need it.

224- A Sea Worth its Salt

"Hello, Beautiful Nerd" ringtone by Roman Mars

Hello Beautiful Nerd- Roman Mars

As the world entered the Atomic Age, humankind faced a new fear that permeated just about every aspect of daily life: the threat of nuclear war. And while the violent applications of atomic research had already been proven, governments and scientists hoped this powerful technology held promise for peaceful applications as well. As part of the "Atoms For Peace" efforts, experts would be mobilized to apply atomic science to the fields of energy, medicine, and agriculture. One of the products of these initiatives were the atomic gardens of the 1950s and 60s—experiments that used radioactive material to genetically alter plants into what they hoped would be better, stronger breeds. And the legacies of these largely forgotten experiments are still around today in the form of fruits, vegetables, and grains that can be found in grocery stores and markets the world over.

248- Atom in the Garden of Eden

“There's a secret jazz seeping from Washington's aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?”
 
-Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro's screechy, wailing escalators” Washington Post

Ever since the industrial revolution, when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass produced, it has been the slight imperfections and wear introduced by human use that has transformed a quality mass produced product into a thing we love. Your worn blue jeans, your grandmothers iron skillet, the initial design determined their quality, but it’s their imperfections that make them comfortable, that make them lovable, that make them yours. 

And if you think that a “slightly broken” escalator can’t be lovable, then our own Sam Greenspan would like to introduce you to Chris Richards.

Chris Richards is a music critic for the Washington Post, and after years of ignoring the wailing and screeching of the much maligned, often broken escalators in the DC Metro, he began to hear them in a new way. He began to hear them as music.


99% Invisible-43- The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators

Imagine for a moment the year 1800. A doctor is meeting with a patient - most likely in the patient’s home. The patient is complaining about shortness of breath. A cough, a fever. The doctor might check the patient’s pulse or feel their belly, but unlike today, what’s happening inside of the patient's body is basically unknowable. There’s no MRI. No X-rays. The living body is like a black box that can’t be opened.
The only way for a doctor to figure out what was wrong with a patient was to ask them, and as a result patients’ accounts of their symptoms were seen as diseases in themselves. While today a fever is seen as a symptom of some underlying disease like the flu, back then the fever was essentially regarded as the disease itself.
But in the early 1800s, an invention came along that changed everything. Suddenly the doctor could clearly hear what was happening inside the body. The heart, the lungs, the breath. This revolutionary device was the stethoscope.

270- The Stethoscope

Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s, when mining safety laws started requiring reflective materials underground, miners used those stickers to stay visible to each other.
As time passed, the stickers evolved. They became more personal and started to tell miners’ stories. And the mine companies themselves started printing stickers for their workers. Stickers went from simple ads to signifying an identity. And as their role changed, stickers also came to serve as a kind of currency among miners.

275- Coal Hogs Work Safe

Around the world, there is a lot of buzz around the idea of universal basic income (also known as "unconditional basic income" or UBI). It can take different forms or vary in the details, but in essence: UBI is the idea a government would pay all citizens, employed or not, a flat monthly sum to cover basic needs. This funding would come with no strings attached or special conditions, which would remove any potential stigma associated with receiving it. In short: it would be free money.

There's been a lot of recent excitement around the idea, especially after an experiment launched by the Finnish government started in early 2017. It has the public and the media wondering: how will recipients react to getting this unconditional source of income.

276- The Finnish Experiment

Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something far more complicated. It's gone through very hard times, but also it’s hopeful. It’s a microcosm of the South Africa’s history, but it’s also a place that moves on. And to this day, this strange concrete tube at the center of Johannesburg’s skyline continues to play the same role for newcomers that it has for decades: serving as the diverse entry point to the city.

277- Ponte City Tower

Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title IX in 1972, women’s interest in athletics surged. But their breasts presented an obstacle.
Bouncing breasts hurt, as women getting in on the jogging craze found out. Then some friends in Vermont had an idea to stitch a couple jock straps together to build a contraption to keep things in place.
This featured story was produced by Phoebe Flanigan and edited by Peter Frick-Wright, with music by Robbie Carver and Dennis Funk. XX Factor: How the Sports Bra Changed History was originally aired on the Outside podcast, a production of Outside Magazine and PRX.

278- The Athletic Brassiere

It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the entire downtown area of Los Angeles. It’s very clear when you’ve entered Skid Row. The sidewalks are mostly occupied by makeshift homes. A dizzying array of tarps and tents stretch out for blocks, improvised living structures sitting side by side.
The edge of Skid Row is also clearly defined and it wasn't drawn by accident.  It’s the result of a very specific plan to keep homeless people on one side and development on the other. And, perhaps surprisingly to outsiders: it’s a plan that Skid Row residents and their allies actually designed and fought for.

279- The Containment Plan

The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way, in units that are basically inscrutable to non-Americans, nearly all of whom have been brought up in an all-metric environment. Most of the world uses meters, liters, and kilograms, not yards, gallons, and pounds. With so many industries and people crossing borders with so much fluidity, why has the U.S. not fully committed to the system the rest of the world uses? The answer is complicated.

280- Half Measures

The line to enter Barcelona’s most famous cathedral often stretches around the block. La Sagrada Família, designed by Antoni Gaudí, draws millions of visitors each year.

There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing that sets it apart from your average old Gothic cathedral: it isn’t actually old.

Gaudí wasn’t able to build very much of his famous church before he died in 1926. Most of it has been built in the last 40 years, and it still isn’t finished. Which means that architects have had to figure out, and still are figuring out, how Gaudí wanted the church to be built.

281- La Sagrada Familia

New York was built at the mouth of the Hudson River, and that fertile estuary environment was filled with all kinds of marine life. But one creature in particular shaped the landscape: the oyster. It is estimated that trillions of oysters once surrounded New York City, filtering bacteria and acting as a natural buffer against storm surges.

Over time, pollution and other environmental changes killed off that oyster population. But a group of landscape architects are designing artificial oyster reefs to help protect the city and foster a better relationship between the natural and built environment along this coastal edge.

99% Invisible

282- Oyster-tecture

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was prosperous. Black-owned businesses thrived and the neighborhood was filled with the lovely, ornate brick homes the city has become famous for.

But driving around The Ville today, the neighborhood looks very different. Some buildings are simply rundown or abandoned, but others are missing large chunks entirely. Walls have disappeared. The bricks are gone. "We call them dollhouses," says local Alderman Samuel Moore, "because you can look inside of them."

People have been stealing the bricks.

283- Dollhouses of St. Louis

When a new movie comes out, most of the praise goes to the director and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of them are designers. There are costume designers and set designers, but also graphic designers working behind the scenes on every single graphic object that you might need in a film. It’s Annie Atkins’s job to design them.

284- Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television

“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…”
-Andrea Seabrook, NPR Congressional Correspondent

In the eight years Andrea Seabrook has been reporting on Congress, she has made it a point to get to know the whole Capitol building.  "The members of the House Republican Caucus--and sometimes the Democrats--meet in the basement for their closed door secret strategy sessions," Andrea says.  "And it's really good place to get a tip from members that you know about what’s going on."  One day, after getting the info she needed for her story, she decided to press further on into the depths of the Capitol.

That's when she found the marble bathtubs.

The bathtubs were installed around 1860 during the expansion of the Capitol. DC is known for its swampy summers, and legend has it that senators could be banished from the chamber if they were too smelly.  But lawmakers--like most Americans at the time--didn't have indoor plumbing at home. They needed a place where they could wash up.

So the Architect of the Capitol ordered six marble bath tubs, each three by seven feet and carved by hand in Italy, to be installed in the Capitol basement--three on the House side, three on the senate. Today, only two tubs remain on the Senate side, in a room which now stores the building's heating and cooling equipment. But evidence of room's former grandeur remains.

99% Invisible-48- The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room

"Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart" 
Daniel D'Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners.

Cities are great. They have movement, activity and diversity. But go to any city and it’s pretty clear, a place can be diverse without really being integrated. This segregation isn’t accidental. There are design elements in the urban landscape, that Daniel D’Oca calls “weapons,” that are used by “architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, neighborhood associations, and individuals to wage the ongoing war between integration and segregation.”

Daniel D'Oca is an urban planner with Interboro Partners, an architecture and design firm based in New York City. Over the past few years, D'Oca, along with colleagues  lTobias Armborst and Georgeen Theodore  have been cataloguing all the stuff inside of a city that planners use to increase or restrict people's access to space.  They're publishing their findings in a book called The Arsenal of Inclusion and Exclusion:  101 Things That Open And Close the City (Fall 2012).

D’Oca took our own San Greenspan and Scott Goldberg on a tour of Baltimore to demonstrate the subtle ways different neighborhoods are kept apart.


99% Invisible-51- The Arsenal of Exclusion

If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200 Belgian breweries, there’s a very specific sub-type: Trappist beers. 

According to our reporter Cyrus Farivar (also from Episode #36 “Super Bonn Bon”), there are two things you need to know about Trappist beers. First, they’re amazing. Second, they’re made by Trappist monks. These monks trace their roots to a monastery in 17th century France, and have since spread out to all over the world.

The main concept behind the Trappist lifestyle is that the abbey should be economically self-sufficient. In other words, the monks should make something and sell it to the public as a way to fund the operations of the abbey itself. Some make cheese. Some make spirits. There’s even one in Germany that makes lentil soup. But none of the Trappist products are as famous as the beer.

The beer that is considered the best of the best is Westvleteren 12. With its plain brown bottle, no label, the only writing is on the cap- the beer is super cool. It’s quite rare and year after year it’s rated the best beer in the world.

But here’s the thing about Westvleteren. You can’t just go there and have as much beer as you want. You can’t even have it shipped from the abbey. If you want to buy beer to take with you, you have to look up the beer reservation phone number on the abbey’s website. Then, you call certain phone number during certain hours, on certain days.

If you’re lucky enough to talk to a monk to take your reservation, you have to give your license plate number and be available to come pick up your crate during the appointed time that weekend. You’re limited to one crate per person per car, maximum two per car. And, you can’t buy more than one crate during a 60-day period. You also have to agree not to resell the beer.

This sort of thing is not unheard of: velvet ropes and random reward have long been imposed to create artificial scarcity to heighten demand, but the mainstream trend today seems to be more geared toward greater access and accommodation for customers. The new ideal is that everything is available, at all times, no matter where you live. Yet the Westvleteren Trappists are trying to make it as difficult as possible.

Jef van den Steen, author of a book called “Trappist: The Seven Heavenly Beers” and an acclaimed brewer himself, says that’s not the case, “Before, Westvleteren was only well-known was in Belgium. And now it’s worldwide, and that’s the problem. They decide we will brew the same amount as the last 40-50 years, and they have enough for that, so why must they brew more? Because you want? No. They live between the walls of the abbey, so for them it’s not a problem.”

The “customer service” is not designed to provide convenience for the consumer of their beer, it is designed for monks themselves. Their “customer” is God. They have a mission, and making beer is only a fraction of that. The Head of the Abbey says, "We are not brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks."

Cyrus Farivar recently returned to California after having lived in Bonn, Germany for two years. These days, he can be found frequenting The Trappist bar in downtown Oakland. He plans on presenting a bottle of Westvleteren 12 to his favorite bar owners. His book, "The Internet of Elsewhere," was published last year.


99% Invisible-55- The Best Beer in the World

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

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

http://99percentinvisible.org/

New episodes every Wednesday.

On the radio on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am.  And public radio stations across the country.

Created by Roman Mars.


Roman Mars

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