Complete & chronological playlist of the first 284 episodes Roman Mars' wonderful program, 99 Percent Invisible. Ninety two hours of fascinating stuff! This is not automated. I update it when new episodes are uploaded to Soundcloud.

Unfortunately, the last update to the official account was at the end of 2017 & I have been unable to get an answer as to whether 99% Invisible will be further updated on Soundcloud. I've switched to Stitcher for personal listening.

For the latest episodes go go https://99percentinvisible.org/

99% INVISIBLE complete playlist

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

99% Invisible

We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible: No cardinals. Meaning, we deal with the built world, not the natural world.

So, when I read Jon Mooallem’s brilliant book, Wild Ones: A sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America, I didn’t think we'd ever do an episode of 99% Invisible about it. I just read it for fun.

But then I saw Jon perform stories from the book live with musical accompaniment from the band Black Prairie. And that changed everything.

What you need to know about Wild Ones is that it's not a book about nature. It’s a book about how we fit nature into our lives. Wild Ones is about the cutesy stuffed animals, the eco-tours, and the byzantine methods of conservation that evolve when our experience with wild life goes from something natural to something designed. Human-animal interaction has become a designed experience and the story of that transition, as the title of the book suggests, is sometimes dismaying and weirdly reassuring.

99% Invisible-91- Wild Ones Live

I love those moments when you're walking in your neighborhood and suddenly nothing is familiar. In a good way.

Sean Cole began seeing his neighborhood, actually the whole city of New York, with new eyes because of one artist who is trying to do nothing less than draw all the buildings in New York.

James Gulliver Hancock's drawings are intricate, but still a little cartoony. Little squiggles and dots hover above the roofs, as though they're saying "look out!" or maybe "ta-da!"

Cole became infected with Hancock's worldview and began to appreciate all the tiny details the artist would highlight.

99% Invisible-92- All The Buildings

The story goes like this: Theophilus Van Kannel hated chivalry.  There was nothing he despised  more than trying to walk in or out of a building, and locking horns with other men in a game of "oh you first, I insist." But most of all, Theophilus Van Kanel hated opening doors for women.

He set about inventing his way out of social phobia. And that's how, 1888, Theophilus Van Kannel was awarded US Patent #387571 A for a "Storm-door structure," which would soon become known as the revolving door.

99% Invisible-93- Revolving Doors

There is an allure in unbuilt structures: the utopian, futuristic transports, the impossibly tall skyscrapers, even the horrible highways, all capture our imagination with what could have been. Whether these never built structures are perceived as good or bad, they still had an effect on the environment that does exist. We talk with Allison Arieff, John King and Andrew Lynch about the amazing things we missed out on and the bullets we dodged in the history of the unbuilt in San Francisco and New York City.

Season 4 Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748303376/99-invisible-season-4-weekly

99% Invisible-94- Unbuilt

Elevators are old. They would have to be. Because it is in our nature to rise.

History is full of things that lift other things. In ancient Greece, and China, and Hungary, there were systems of weights and pulleys and platforms designed to bring nobility--or their meals--to new heights.

And somewhere below were draft animals, or even people, tasked with turning a wheel to bring these early elevators up and down. One man even spent the year of 1743 in a chimney in order to turn a lever to raise King Louis XV on a platform so the king wouldn't have to walk up a single flight of stairs.

These elevators were dangerous. Ropes would snap, and then anything getting raised or lowered would plummet to the ground. Fall one story and you break your leg--fall two stories you break your neck. And this fear of falling kept building heights low. People only wanted to ascend as high as they could walk. The tallest buildings for most of the 19th century were churches, or lighthouses--buildings made up primarily of empty space.

And then came Elisha Otis.

Nate Dimeo from the memory palace provides our stories today. It's a fantastic monthly program everyone should subscribe to.

99% Invisible-98- Six Stories- The Memory Palace

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-02- 99% 180

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

99% Invisible-04- 99% Details

99% Invisible-05- 99% Forgotten

99% Invisible-06- 99% Symbolic

99% Invisible-08- 99% Free Parking

99% Invisible-09- 99% Private

99% Invisible-09X-99% Doomed

99% Invisible-10- 99% Sound and Feel

99% Invisible-16- A Designed Language

99% Invisible-18- Check Cashing Stores

99% Invisible-20- Nikko Concrete Commando

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

In the US, it’s called a line.
In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up.
Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue.

My friend Benjamen Walker is obsessed with queues. He keeps sending me YouTube clips of queue violence. This preoccupation led him to find a man known as “Dr. Queue.” Richard Larson is a queue theorist at MIT and he talks us through some of the logic behind the design of queues.

Whereas US companies like Wendy’s and American Airlines once prided themselves on their invention of the single serpentine, first-come first-served queue, more and more companies are instituting priority queues, offering different wait times for different classes of customers.

Benjamen Walker is the host and producer of Too Much Information from WFMU. TMI explores the issues and conflicts of life in the digital era and regularly features some of the leading sages of the information age as well as original fiction and radio drama. It’s very important that you subscribe to this podcast. He is also the host and producer of Big Ideas, a monthly philosophy program from The Guardian UK. Again, it’s just too good to miss. 


99% Invisible-49- Queue Theory and Design

The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence of sound that defines the approach to architecture.
 
Gallaudet is a university dedicated to educating the deaf and hard of hearing, and for the last 3 years, they’ve re-thought principles of architecture with one question at the forefront: how do deaf people communicate in space? 
 
Unlike hearing people, the deaf have to keep sightlines in order to maintain conversations. So when deaf people walk and talk, they’ll lock into a kind of dance. Going through a doorway, one person will spin in place and walk backwards to keep talking. Walking past a column, two deaf people in conversation will move in tandem to avoid collision.
 
Spaces designed for the hearing can also give the deaf a great deal of anxiety – when you can’t hear footsteps from around the corner or behind you, you can’t anticipate who or what is around you.
 
Robert Sirvage is a deaf designer, researcher, and professor at Gallaudet, and in collaboration with Hansel Bauman -- who is not deaf – they’ve developed a project called DeafSpace. Reporter Tom Dreisbach took a tour through the new building at Gallaudet that is incorporating the innovations of DeafSpace to create an environment more pleasing to everyone, both hearing and deaf.


99% Invisible-50- DeafSpace

"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

Even during the construction of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the slightest breeze. Construction workers on the span chewed on lemon wedges to stop their motion sickness. They nicknamed the structure Galloping Gertie. 

The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge design by Clark Eldridge was pretty conventional for a suspension bridge, but it was later modified by Leon Moisseiff to be slimmer and more elegant. The most notable change was that the 25 foot lattice of stiffening trusses underneath the bridge on the original drawings, were replaced with 8 foot solid steel plate girders. The new solid girder along the side in Moisseiff’s design made for a much lighter and more flexible bridge-- it also caught the wind like a sail-- but they didn’t know that. Moisseiff’s design was also 2/3 the price of the original Eldridge design and that fact ultimately won the day. 

Motorists who used the bridge found out first hand why it got the name Galloping Gertie, and during the four months while the bridge was open, many traveled from far away just to ride the undulating waves as they crossed high above Puget Sound. The thrill ride didn’t last long.

On November 7, 1940 stiff winds caused the road deck to twist violently along its center axis. The center span endured these brutal torsional forces for about an hour and finally gave way.

The collapse of the twisting suspension bridge is one of the most dramatic images caught on film.

I talked to John Marr from the seminal zine Murder Can Be Fun for this story and I’d like to give a shout out to Alan Bellows of Damn Interesting for independently suggesting Galloping Gertie and publishing a great, much more detailed account of the disaster on his site. 





99% Invisible-52- Galloping Gertie

On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into the most miniscule details of a political campaign.  

Andrea reveals seven (and a half) secrets about the staging of events along the campaign trail.  Like how every campaign has an "Advance Team" that flies in ahead of a candidate and makes everything from a campaign rally to a 20-minute media appearance run smoothly.

Andrea spoke with Advance guys John Seaton and Donnie Fowler, who have been directing this very American brand of political theatre for years.  


99% Invisible-63- The Political Stage

When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach.

It has long been hypothesized that stripes on zebras make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood sucking horseflies. This is called disruptive camouflage.  

When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle.

Dazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as design solution to a very dire problem: American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-Boats. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean.  They needed a way to fend of the torpedoes.  

Conventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn't work in the open sea.  Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there's no way to hid all the smoke left by the ships' smoke stacks.  
 
The strategy of this high-difference, dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility.  It was about disruption.  Confusion.

Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there.  They had to determine the target ship's speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope. 

The torpedo gunner's margin of error for hitting a ship was quite low.  Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees. 

Our expert this week is Roy Behrens, a professor graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa.  He's published several books about camouflage, and also runs the Camoupedia blog.

99% Invisible-65- Razzle Dazzle

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

So if you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather, had a new logo. To be more precise they had a new “visual identity system,” which is the kind of entirely accurate, but completely wonky description that gets met with sarcastic eye rolls from anyone who isn’t a designer, but there it is. But they don’t have a new logo. Because of a massive public backlash, the UC system actually suspended the monogram logo while we were reporting this story.

In this episode, we talk to the Creative Director of the UC Office of the President, Vanessa Correa, who led the team that created this short-lived brand identity and Christopher Simmons, principal of MINE, who waded into the UC logo fight with a brilliant blog post called “Why the UC Rebrand is Better Than You Think.”

This piece was reported by Cyrus Farivar, who also produced the 99% Invisible episodes about Bonn, Germany and Westvleteren beer.


99% Invisible-69- The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo

There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up--literally.   Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going through a tremendous growth spurt since its economic boom of the mid 1990s.  It happened fast. In just a few years, single family homes all over the city were replaced with high rises.

A man named Rodrigo Rojas played a small part in Santiago’s "upward mobility"--which wouldn’t be that remarkable if he were an engineer, a real estate developer, or an architect. But Rodrigo Rojas is a poet. 

This is how it worked: A developer bought an old house, tore it down, and had an architect draw up plans for a high rise. And then Rodrigo stepped in to give the building a name. Rodrigo even fabricated whole stories in the service of building an identity. He came up with one story about a ship called the Zanzibar, a luxury liner built with the Titanic, but slightly smaller. You've never heard of it, he explained, because the Zanzibar never sank.

Our reporter this week is Daniel Alarcón, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante.


99% Invisible-73- The Zanzibar and Other Building Poems

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% Invisible-76- The Modern Moloch

There’s something about rebar that fascinates me. If nothing else because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered.

My preoccupation with metal reinforcement bars dovetails nicely with a structure in San Francisco I’ve kind of become obsessed with-- a tiny bridge on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park called the Alvord Lake Bridge.

Ernest Ransome, the father of modern rebar, constructed the bridge in 1889. Today, it is a dumpy, cracked and neglected structure. The inside is a surreal tunnel of phony stalactites. 

But the Alvord Lake Bridge is, quite literally, the bridge to the modern world. It is one the oldest reinforced concrete structures still standing. The twisted iron bars embedded in the bridge served as the model for the all the rebar containing structures that followed. It is the ancestor to an endless number of reinforced concrete buildings, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and foundations. Ransome major innovation in rebar was to twist the square bar so that it bonded to the concrete better.

Concrete has incredible compression strength, but it does not have much tensile strength. So if you want concrete to span any significant distance, you need to embed metal reinforcement.

There are plenty of candidates for the most overlooked, most invisible part of the built world, but reinforced concrete has a good claim to being the most invisible of all. Because if it’s made right, you never see the steel skeleton underneath the all the concrete structures that you work in, drive over, and walk under.

The problem with steel reinforcement is that it rusts. When the steel begins to rust, the bond with the surrounding concrete is broken. The rusted metal also swells and breaks the concrete apart. Because of this, most of the reinforced concrete structures that are constantly exposed to the elements (like our highway system) were only designed to last 50 years. More advanced concrete mixtures and epoxy coated rebar increase the longevity, but without regular maintenance, entropy eventually wins out.

Ernest Ransome left San Francisco soon after he completed the Alvord Lake Bridge. In his book “Reinforced Concrete Buildings” published in 1912, you can detect a tinge of bitterness in Ransome’s text as he describes how his twisted rebar was “laughed down” by the Technical Society in California. He left for the east thinking that his revolution of reinforced concrete would have a better chance out there. He left thinking that no one here would fully appreciate his Alvord Lake Bridge, his bridge to the modern world. And looking at it today, I’m sad to say, he was right.

Thanks to CCA Senior Adjunct Professor of Architecture, William Littman (he of the Forgotten Monument) for first telling me about the Alvord Lake Bridge and showing me around. I spoke with Robert Courland, author of Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World’s Most Common Man-Made Material (a great book!) and Bob Risser of the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (a great person to talk to!).

99% Invisible-81- Rebar And The Alvord Lake Bridge

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.
