99% Invisible

There was one song he really liked the super tramp crime of the century.

Great song and a section of that song towards the end where it just becomes a sort of driving piece.

It had this sense of sort of operatic sort of classicism and sort of gravitas but it also had a very gritty, earthy and almost jazzy or bluesy kind of instrumentation or rock and roll.

traffic was so heavy in the 1870s that a cow tunnel, in quotation marks, and capitalized actually, was built beneath 12th Avenue to serve as an underground passage and it's rumored to be there still awaiting designation as a landmark site.

This is historian John Martini. Martini wrote a book about this place called Sutro's Glass Palace, so named because this pool of water used to be underneath an enormous glass structure.

It was sold to a land developer who began to demolish it, and in June 66, that's when the very convenient fire broke out.

Owen Jones was an architect who took a special interest in ornament and pattern.

His book, The Grammar of Ornament, has pages and pages of pure pattern and then, you know, some text intervening. But for the most part, it's just colorful squares of pattern from buildings all over the world.

I mean, you've got India, you've got Chinese, you have Moorish, Celtic, Turkish, like an Epcot tour of wallpapers.

It was particularly Owen Jones's work, The Grammar of Ornament, where the quatrefoil had a very important place.

He hoped The Grammar of Ornament would provide context and background for these patterns and that they would be a source of inspiration which anyone and everyone could use.

Telling our story today is Neil Bascom. My name is Neil Bascom. He wrote a great book about this called Hire, a historic race to the sky and the making of a city. I'm the author of Hire and a number of other books.

I'm Arthur Weingarten. I wrote the book, The Sky is Falling, about the B-25 bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building.

Sci-fi obsession met design obsession, and the resulting glorious nerd fest was a book. We're the authors of the book Make It So, interaction design lessons from science fiction.

He started this pretty obsessive little project that ultimately culminated in a book.

The name of the book... I have to say I love the title. It's so earnest. Is... All the Buildings in New York. All the Buildings in New York that I've drawn so far.

It's like what a six-year-old would call it.

The book is just a sampling of his blog of the same name. Actually, the blog is just called All the Buildings in New York. Without the That I've Drawn So Far disclaimer.

In the book, there are only about 170, most of them in Manhattan.

Jerry Head's book about Neff is titled No Nails, No Lumber,

One turns onto a small residential street and is confronted with a house that looks nothing like a house.

He did an iconic Bob Dylan poster and Philip Roth book covers.

It's Glenn Weldon, author of Superman, the Unauthorized Biography, grasping for an explanation.

And the first thing Glenn told me is that I need to dispense with this notion that Superman should be relatable.

As you go through the history of Superman in Glenn Weldon's book, you find a character that adapts in strange ways to reflect the zeitgeist and anxieties of the time.

And that is Robert Corlin, author of Concrete Planet Giving Us a Lay of the Land.

In his book Reinforced Concrete Buildings published in 1912, which is not the most scintillating of texts, but in it you can detect a tinge of bitterness in Ransom's words as he describes how his twisted rebar was laughed down by the technical society in California.

My name is Natasha Dow Schull and I'm an associate professor at MIT and the title of my book is Addiction by Design. All about machine gambling in Las Vegas.

So there's lots of little tricks by which designers try to get us to feel that we are still playing an analog mechanical device.

One gambler in my book rose who said you know I became a slot machine technician to understand more about these machines and I thought it would be a good part of my recovery from the addiction because I thought if I understand how these machines work the spell will be broken and she said you know even after I was putting these machines together and designing them at work on my lunch breaks I would just go down the street and play the exact same machines. Because that is how addiction work.

We'll have more info about Shul's really great book Addiction by Design and her film about all you can eat Vegas buffets.

I'm the author of Secret Stairs, a walking guide to the historic staircases of Los Angeles.

And we're here where Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, about to embark on a stairwalk. It's actually stairwalk number 41 from the book Secret Stairs.

The East Bay Stairbook is actually a spin-off of his previous book, Secret Stairs of Los Angeles, which is where Charles lives.

The East Bay Stairbook is actually a spin-off of his previous book, Secret Stairs of Los Angeles, which is where Charles lives.

The East Bay Stairbook is actually a spin-off of his previous book, Secret Stairs of Los Angeles, which is where Charles lives.

I'm the author of Secret Stairs, a walking guide to the historic staircases of Los Angeles.

And we're here where Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, about to embark on a stairwalk. It's actually stairwalk number 41 from the book Secret Stairs.

The East Bay Stairbook is actually a spin-off of his previous book, Secret Stairs of Los Angeles, which is where Charles lives.