BOOK TALK
The 99% Invisible Man BY LIZ LOGAN ’05
99% invisible, founded and hosted by Roman Mars ’94, has hundreds of thousands of listeners, making it one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes and other platforms. It’s a weekly architecture and design show, but it bypasses gleaming high-rises and ornate facades to instead home in on the seemingly mundane details of urban life: curb cuts, bench armrests, and orange spray paint markings on sidewalks and streetlamp posts. On the occasion of the show’s 10th anniversary, Mars released his first book, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, co-authored with the show’s digital director and producer, Kurt Kohlstedt. The 400-page tome organizes 10 10
years of reportage into easy-to-browse sections, such as “Geography,” “Urbanism,” and “Infrastructure.” Offbeat pen-and-ink illustrations by Patrick Vale feature everything from Times Square to the inflatable air dancers seen at used-car lots. The book’s fall 2020 release, coinciding with the COVID-19 crisis, was oddly fitting. “We use examples from all over the world to show you how wonderful the manhole cover on your corner is,” Mars says. “It’s a guide for finding wonder wherever you are, which is particularly useful when many of us can’t travel the way we want to.” 99% Invisible began in 2010, when Mars was working as a freelance reporter/producer for KALW, the public radio station in San Francisco. The station wanted to do a weekly piece about architecture, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, to run during Morning Edition. “But I knew from the beginning I didn’t want it to just be local architecture,” Mars recalls. “I’m
someone who is fascinated by the little details, so I wanted it to be about very small things, but also big things, about design and the built environment.” The first episode was about acoustic design, and the next was on the Transamerica Pyramid building. Mars also put out the segment as a podcast—podcasts were niche at the time, this was four years before Serial brought podcasts to the attention of the general public—and it began to grow a loyal group of listeners. But when Mars wanted 99% Invisible to run as a longer program, he couldn’t find a public radio station to carry it. So he turned to Kickstarter, where he launched a series of campaigns that broke records in the journalism category. The first raised $175,000, allowing Mars to hire an employee to work on the podcast with him. “That shocked the system,” he recalls. His Kickstarters proved that journalism podcasts could be self-supporting entities, independent of public radio, which ultimately led others to follow suit (This American Life, for
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: RYAN SPROWL, PHOTO COURTESY PODCAST MOVEMENT
Thought Process