If you’re struggling to navigate between the telephone poles and the oil production wells, hunting for San Francisco references could be a good way to go. The authors recommend carving your own “desire path” through its pages, a favorite 99 Percent Invisible concept that describes the paths that naturally form across an unobstructed area as people seek the most pleasant and convenient route. “There was just something about breaking open this information and making it perusable and possible to go through it in a different way that made sense at this point in the life of the show.”Ī comprehensive work - 350 pages, not including the bibliography - the Field Guide contains a lot more information than you’d ever imagine you wanted to know. “I’ve been doing the show for 10 years, and there are so many stories kind of locked up in this linear format,” said Mars, who, along with Kohlstedt, joined me for this week’s edition of the SF Weekly Podcast (tune in this weekend to hear our entire chat). While the podcast excavates all manner of design problems - like the origin stories of credit cards, sports bras, and generic food products - the book zooms in, real close, on cities. The new book, by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt, is a holdable, readable, skimmable version of the hit design podcast, 99 Percent Invisible, which the two men host and produce, respectively.
They are just two of the oft-overlooked pieces of urban infrastructure meticulously explained in The 99 Percent Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. The stars are a design flourish of anchor plates, which help stabilize seismically unsafe buildings, while the brick circles denote subsurface cisterns, built following the 1906 earthquake and fire to ensure the city never again runs out of water. Have you ever wondered about those rows of metal stars stamped on to the sides of old buildings? Or the brick circles at the center of some San Francisco intersections?
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