Historical Plaques
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Contents Title Page Contents The 99% Invisible Field Guide to the Cover Dedication Copyright Introduction Chapter 1: Inconspicuous Ubiquitous Camouflage Accretions Chapter 2: Conspicuous Identity Safety Signage Chapter 3: Infrastructure Civic Water Technology Roadways Public Chapter 4: Architecture Liminal Materials Regulations Towers Foundations Heritage Chapter 5: Geography Delineations Configurations Designations Landscapes Synanthropes Chapter 6: Urbanism Hostilities Interventions Catalysts Outro Acknowledgments Bibliography Index About the Authors Connect with HMH The 99% Invisible Field Guide to the Cover Fig. 1 • EMERGENCY BOXES: Small safes affixed to urban architecture allow emergency personnel to quickly access buildings using a master key, saving time and lives in critical situations. Instead of breaking glass and risking injury or causing damage, firefighters can walk right in. Advanced versions of these boxes also allow responders to control gas and sprinkler systems. Fig. 2 • ANCHOR PLATES: Small metal circles, squares, and stars affixed to building exteriors are visible parts of wall anchoring systems designed to hold old buildings together and to prevent bricks from falling off of facades. Fig. 3 • THOMASSONS: As cities change, sometimes useless remnants are left behind. Some of these artifacts are eventually demolished, but others persist, and some are even actively cleaned and repaired despite no longer serving their original purpose. A Japanese artist dubbed them “Thomassons,” referencing a baseball player whose career took a turn, leaving him well paid but mostly on the bench—useless, but maintained. Fig. 4 • TRAFFIC LIGHTS: Most of the world’s traffic signals are arranged with the red light on top, yellow or amber in the middle, and green at the bottom. This convention is inverted, however, at one exceptional crossroads located in an Irish neighborhood of Syracuse, New York. Fig. 5 • ELECTRICITY METERS: Before modern systems were developed to track energy usage, utility customers were billed based on the available metrics, such as how many light bulbs were present in their households. Later, as home solar panels reversed the direction of energy flow, meter dials designed to track incoming electricity were found to turn backward as well. Fig. 6 • FIRE ESCAPES: Fire has long been one of the greatest existential threats to buildings and their occupants. Before contemporary interior fire staircases became standard, metal step and ladder systems were commonly attached to buildings. These ultimately proved insufficient, but were a big step up from mobile ladders on fire trucks with limited reach. Fig. 7 • MANSARD ROOFS: When the city of Paris introduced new building height limits a few centuries ago, the new measurement system contained a loophole. Property owners discovered they could build up attic levels above the cornice line, creating extra space behind steeply sloped “French roofs.” This style has since spread around the world. Fig. 8 • TRASH PANDAS: Among the largest, most clever, and persistent urban synanthropes, raccoons have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt in built environments. These puzzle-solving creatures have inspired increasingly sophisticated systems for locking up waste containers, which has raised some concerns about further training these fast-learning animals. Fig. 9 • DISCOMFORTING SEATS: Armrests can be an amenity, but they can also serve as a form of dissuasion, a kind of hostile architecture. Some public benches feature armrests that are shaped and spaced to keep people from getting too comfortable, lying down, or sleeping in public spaces. Such defensive design strategies can be very controversial. Fig. 10 • CURB CUTS: At street corners, graded ramps smoothly connect sidewalks and streets for accessibility reasons and are often topped with a layer of tactile paving to assist the visually impaired. This ramping approach gained traction after activists smashed conventional curbs with sledgehammers in acts of awareness-raising intervention. Fig. 11 • CANNON BOLLARDS: Early curbside bollards were generally made of wood, but over time metal bollards emerged, including ones made from old ship cannons. The shapes of cannon bollards have inspired other, similar-looking traffic bollard designs over time as well. It can be hard to tell the real cannons from the fakes, but they are all real bollards. Fig. 12 • NEON SIGNS: The element neon was named from the Greek neos, meaning “new.” Shortly after its discovery, an inventor began putting this material to use in commercial neon signs, at first associated with bright and bustling cities, then later with seedy establishments. Red has long been a popular color choice because it is the natural hue of burning neon. While some signs use other gases to achieve different colors, they are all still generically called “neon.” Fig. 13 • CHECKERED PATTERNS: The “Battenburg” pattern used on police vehicles and uniforms in and beyond the UK was developed to be both highly visible and recognizable. One of its precursors, the “Sillitoe Tartan,” is not actually a tartan as such, but rather a checkered pattern adapted from Highland precedents by a British chief constable for police use in Glasgow. For all you plaque readers and curious urbanists Copyright © 2020 by Roman Mars All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mars, Roman, author. | Kohlstedt, Kurt, author. Title: The 99% invisible city : a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design / Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt. Other titles: Ninety-nine percent invisible city : a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023323 (print) | LCCN 202002332 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358126607 (hardback) | ISBN 9780358396369 | ISBN 9780358396383 | ISBN 9780358125020 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns—Miscellanea. | Public works—Miscellanea. Classification: LCC NA9050 .M29 2020 (print) | LCC NA9050 (ebook) | DDC 720—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023323 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023324 Cover design by Raphael Geroni Illustrations by Patrick Vale v2.0920 INTRODUCTION THE WORLD IS FULL OF AMAZING THINGS. WALK AROUND ANY MAJOR CITY and you will find soaring skyscrapers that inspire awe, bridges that are marvels of engineering, and lush parks that provide respite from the concrete landscape. There are travel guides for all of that. This, however, is a guide to the overlooked and ordinary: the boring stuff. The truth is that the mundane objects we pass by without noticing or trip over without thinking can represent as much genius and innovation as the tallest building, the longest bridge, or the most manicured park. 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. This has always been the worldview of the 99% Invisible podcast. Since 2010, we have told stories about all the thought that goes into things most people don’t think about. Our name references the everyday objects that are invisible because of their everydayness, but it also refers to the invisible parts of things you do notice. In the case of something like the Chrysler Building, the aesthetics and architecture of the massive Art Deco tower are only 1% of the story. It’s our mission to tell you the hidden parts of the story: the speed of its construction, the building’s place in the great Manhattan skyscraper race, the iconoclastic architect who designed it, and his daring, secret strategy to beat out the competition at the last possible moment. As beautiful as the Chrysler Building is, the 99% Invisible part is the best part. In this book, unlike the podcast, we get the opportunity to show you pretty images (illustrated by Patrick Vale) that help tell the hidden history and development of these designs. That said, this guide is not meant to be an encyclopedia that provides a few rote paragraphs about the inventor and origin story of each object. You have Wikipedia for that. This is about breaking down the cityscape into its more fascinating subparts. Rather than tell you about the first traffic light, we’d rather tell you about 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. Instead of recounting the construction of the jaw-dropping Brooklyn Bridge, we introduce you to the aesthetically mundane Can Opener bridge in Durham, North Carolina, which has an uncanny history of shearing off the tops of tall trucks trying to pass underneath. The Brooklyn Bridge represents an incredible advancement in engineering, but Durham’s Norfolk Southern- Gregson Street Overpass illustrates the perils of sclerotic modern transit bureaucracy, something citizens bang their heads against every day. Like the best-intentioned urban planners, we have laid out a path for you as we walk together through this inevitably incomplete guide to the city. We take you through the things you never noticed as well as the things you always notice but might not understand—from massive top-down municipal infrastructure made by trained planners at their desks to bottom-up citizen interventions created by urban activists. However, there’s no reason why you can’t pick and choose the path through this book that suits your own journey —create a personal desire path, a favorite subject in the 99% Invisible universe. 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.