For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived — and even some regional vernacular we love from places we haven’t lived, but just admire. 99% Invisible is all about who we are through the lens of t … | Continue reading
Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Instagram accounts like House Plant Club have a million followers. Over the past decade there has been a steady stream … | Continue reading
Given the bonds between the United States and Europe in the wake of World War II, it is hard to imagine America’s United Nations headquarters located anywhere but the East Coast, yet hundreds of locations were considered, including the Black Hills of South Dakota. There were a lo … | Continue reading
99 Percent Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an unusually shaped old building on the west side of the Bay. As it turns out, this peculiar octagonal home isn’t unique — there was a whole ar … | Continue reading
In 1989, Japan’s Shinkansen Bullet Train had a problem. It was really fast, pushing 170 miles per hour. But every time it exited a tunnel, it created a loud sonic boom that disrupted surrounding residential neighborhoods. So an engineering team was brought in to design a quieter, … | Continue reading
Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia’s mainland. Winters can get very cold and snowy there. Not many people outside of Russia know much about Sakhalin. Apparently it used to be home to a Tsarist penal colony and Anton Chekov once described it as “hell” but Tatyana Kim … | Continue reading
The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the only grain indigenous to North America, and while it might be called rice, it’s actually not closely related to brown or white rice at all. It has l … | Continue reading
Like it or not, no teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra Lange. In her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain, Lange writes about how malls were conceptually born out of a lack of space for people to convene in Ameri … | Continue reading
Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that’s what we were taught in school, and what a particularly famous painting depicts. But when historians go searching … there’s no proof to be found. The prevailing theories based on the evidence, however, are arguably more in … | Continue reading
Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private collections. In recent years, with the advent of online marketplaces, researchers have begun to find a lot of artifacts for sale on the web. The Sy … | Continue reading
In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence on the world of architecture and design than a … | Continue reading
Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower stru … | Continue reading
The greatest mode of transportation is the funicular, which is a special kind of train pulled by a cable that runs up steep slopes. But trains are great even when they’re not going up treacherous terrain. And in that spirit: here are some of the most ambitious, fascinating, and d … | Continue reading
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, as the virus spread through Wuhan, and then other parts of the world, many countries took unprecedented steps to control the disease. Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, both journalists at The Atlantic, expected to see the same kind of ma … | Continue reading
According to Exercising Health, a company that has studied the issue extensively, modern footwear has altered human running mechanics, resulting in mechanical strain from movement inefficiency. And non-optimal movement is a direct cause of injuries, as well as poor footwear choic … | Continue reading
Back in the mid-1950s, Stephen Chen attended a primary school called Buckingham in Cambridge Massachusetts, right by the Charles River. Every spring, their school had a fair called The Buckingham Circus, with games and activities for the students. Parents would put on a bake sale … | Continue reading
Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated expedition to the Northwest Passage, and one of the men who went looking for them. In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the North … | Continue reading
Every year in the spring, small towns throughout New England host their annual town meeting. Town meetings take place in high school gyms or town halls, and anyone can come. In fact, in Vermont, Town Meeting Day is a public holiday. Everyone gets the day off work to make sure the … | Continue reading
“The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby,” writes design critic Alexandra Lange, “has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year.” In a piece for Bloomberg’s CityLab, she traces the connection bet … | Continue reading
So why don’t we have mouth Roombas? Is the universe full of chickens? What scientific advances are happening? What was the first internet purchase? How do I convince my parents to let me check a bag? What is Twitter? What’s the difference between a telescope and a camera? Are sea … | Continue reading
In February 2021, it began to snow in Austin, Texas, which was unusual, and exciting for some, at least until the power dropped out for millions of people. To many, this came as a shock – how could a state known for its energy production have such widespread, prolonged power outa … | Continue reading
These days, it is easy to go to art stores and buy a variety of paint colors and without needing to understand they come from. But according to The Harvard Art Museums, some of the world’s rarest colors come from exotic sources, like beetles that live on cactuses or dry urine fro … | Continue reading
When the pandemic hit, everything that could possibly be done online made the jump — work, job-hunting, school, doctor’s visits, and so on. The shift was hard for everyone, but many Americans didn’t even have the fundamental thing needed to make that change: a fast and reliable i … | Continue reading
As an architect, Natalie de Blois loved systems – understanding how things worked. For her, it wasn’t just pretty buildings, she challenged the code and questioned the status quo. And like the buildings she designed, there was a certain complexity to Natalie herself. She was a wo … | Continue reading
In the 1990s Dave Davis worked as the groundskeeper at a small neighborhood park in a suburb of St. Louis called Creve Coeur. It was an unpaid position, but it came with a strange perk: as part of the job, he got to live in a house on the grounds. On the outside, it looks | Continue reading
When schools ban books, the strategy often backfires on would-be censors, resulting in greater interest around illicit literature. Similarly, when governments censor the media, groups like Reporters Without Borders spearhead efforts to make such censored material extra visible. … | Continue reading
The Columbia Journalism School recently announced the 16 winners of the 2022 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, including According to Need, a project of 99% Invisible produced by Katie Mingle. The awards were announced during a special virtual presentation, highlightin … | Continue reading
There’s a phrase originating in Shenzhen, China translates to: “Time is money, efficiency is life” — and over the last forty years the city has wasted no time in becoming one of the most productive manufacturing hubs in the world. But along with making 90% of the world’s electron … | Continue reading
On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But Shannon is not a quaint fishing village or farming community. Its industry is its airport. And Shannon Airport is big. It handles up to 1.7 m … | Continue reading
A hot trend in the world of office furniture is “resimercial” design, the word representing an awkward mash-up of residential and commercial. Resimercial items are intended for workspaces but that feel like something you would have at home, comfortable and familiar. One reason fo … | Continue reading
In the late 1800s, lawyer and inventor Thaddeus Cahill patented his “telharmonium,” a machine which would make music and pipe it across Manhattan along phone lines — a century before Rhapsody and Spotify arrived on the streaming scene. Initially, subscribers could dial in by phon … | Continue reading
When the two greatest auction houses in the world – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth of art in 2004, little did they know that they would be forced to engage in an ancient form of ritualized combat known as rock paper scissors. … | Continue reading
Origin story and symbolism are two of the most important ingredients of any superhero universe. But what happens when both of those pieces of a universe get flipped on their head? The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a re … | Continue reading
Jakarta is a coastal city run through with rivers, yet paradoxically: the city is sinking in no small part due to a lack of water as well. As residents pull water to drink from underground aquifers, the city settles — in some places dropping inches each year. At its current rate … | Continue reading
In our final mini-story set of the season, explore French architectural history through the worlds most famous cycling race; parse fact from fiction in a tale of Benjamin Franklin’s prodigious reputation; and dive into the odd origins of those now-iconic metal fire station poles. … | Continue reading
Each year after the holidays, citizens of coastal Nome, Alaska cart out their Christmas trees and set them up on ice amidst a field of other custom figures, creating a temporary winter wonderland that lasts as long as the ice holds (before the trees are carried out to sea). Like … | Continue reading
We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: a strange collision of mundane infrastructure and political insurrection; a graphic design history mystery dating back to the 1980s; what may be the most hated architectural design of 2021 … | Continue reading
New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who’s got the best pizza? What’s the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But all 8.5 million New Yorkers are likely to agree on one thing: Penn Station sucks. There is nothing joyful about Penn Station. It is windowless, … | Continue reading
From too-small balconies that don’t really work to faux shutters on facades, form without function drives some design enthusiasts over the edge. On websites and twitter accounts like Crappy Cheapo Architecture, McMansion Hell and The Craftsman Blog, such superfluous features are … | Continue reading
It’s that time of year again! When 99pi producers and friends of the show join Roman to tell shorter stories, many of which have been sitting on our idea shelves, just waiting for this moment. Our first set of minis delves into the surprisingly controversial logo of a major sport … | Continue reading
Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It’s a land of snowy white peaks, green valleys, and turquoise rivers. The country is beautiful in all seasons, but it is perhaps at its most magical around Christmastime. Like chil … | Continue reading
Information technology is arguably as old as the written word, but the 1900s saw the rise of a paradigm-shifting design all too easily taken for granted. The ancients had clay and stone marble tablets; offices in the industrial revolution had desks with drawers and cubbies and fo … | Continue reading
For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just as amazing as the expansive beauty is how this neighborhood came to be, especially given everything that stood in the way. Collier Heights wa … | Continue reading
During the parade of nations at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Greece’s athletes entered the stadium first, as per a long-standing tradition. But instead of following in alphabetical order, other countries came out in a sequence corresponding to the number of strokes each nati … | Continue reading
The French bulldog is now the second most popular breed in America. Their cute features, portable size, and physical features make for a dog that can easily travel and doesn’t require a lot of exercise. “At around 20 pounds and perfectly sized for carry-on luggage, Frenchies have … | Continue reading
Fitness trends come and go. But the weight, about as low-tech and simple as it gets, is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized within the realm of home appliances, this heavy metal object aids in our dual — and sometimes conflicting … | Continue reading
Photographer Ibarionex Perello recalls how school picture day would go back in the 1970s at the Catholic school he attended in South Los Angeles. He recalls that kids would file into the school auditorium in matching uniforms. They’d sit on a stool, the photographer would snap a … | Continue reading
Photographer Ibarionex Perello recalls how school picture day would go, back in the 1970s at the Catholic school he attended in South Los Angeles. He recalls that kids would file into the school auditorium in matching uniforms. They’d sit on a stool, the photographer would snap a … | Continue reading