The 99% Invisible City

Highlights

So much of the conversation about design centers on beauty, but the more fascinating stories of the built world are about problem-solving, historical constraints, and human drama.

The most interesting traffic light in the world: the one in Syracuse, New York, that has the green light above the red light as a display of Irish pride.

Desire paths emerge when people trample on the grass to cut a route to the place they want to go when urban planners have failed to provide a designated paved walkway.

One of the ways to get robust posts to break properly is called a “slip base” system.

It was not just an impressive display of cosmopolitan splendor but a means to vent gases from the city’s underground sewer system.

As commercial cellular towers began to sprout up in the 1970s, diagrams depicting their coverage areas looked like blobby plant or animal cells pressed up against one another—hence the name “cell phones.”

Tower of Hope on the campus of Beverly Hills High School started out as a bland concrete spire.

“The notion that every city has these deeper wounds and removals that nonetheless never disappear is just incredible to me,”

“You cut something out—and it becomes a building a generation later.

Vexillology is the study of flags. There are five key principles of good flag design according to Kaye, many of which can also be applied to all kinds of other designs:
(1) Keep it simple
(2) Use meaningful symbolism
(3) Use two or three basic colors
(4) No lettering or seals
(5) Be distinctive or be related.

“If you need to write the name of what you’re representing on your flag,” asserts Ted Kaye, “your symbolism has failed.”