99% Invisible - Brilliantly Boring

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

In this bonus episode, Roman unearths the surprising story behind the 99% Invisible's name and delves into the unnoticed brilliance of everyday design—from the origins of reinforced concrete to the artistry of Japan’s manhole covers. This episode is sponsored by PNC Bank, where “brilliantly boring” means stability that allows you to focus on what truly matters.Brilliantly Boring Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Today's bonus episode of 99% Invisible is proudly sponsored by PNC Bank. The world's most remarkable designs are often the ones that are the most overlooked. In fact, a hallmark of great design is that you don't notice it, so it's important to take time to recognize how the boring things spearhead the brilliance all around us. PNC Bank believes in the power of reliability amidst the chaos. While life may offer surprises at every turn, your bank should provide a steady foundation. PNC Bank is committed to being that unwavering partner, a solid foundation of support for your day-to-day life. PNC Bank calls their philosophy, brilliantly boring, which is a mindset I completely relate

to and in an alternate reality, could have been the name of the show 99% of physical, but we will get to that. Embrace the beauty of dependability with PNC Bank by partnering with a bank that keeps your money boring so your life doesn't have to be. Find out more about how PNC's boring philosophy for your money can help deliver brilliance to your life at pnc.com slash brilliantly boring. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. PNC Bank National Association, member FDIC.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I'm gonna take you back into the room where it all began. It was 2010, and the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects approached the radio station where I was working, KALW 91.7, about co-producing a series of short 1-2 minute stories about local architecture. I was working on several different public radio shows as a freelancer, but this idea was immediately compelling to me. My first instinct was to modify the pitch in two key ways.

First off, I felt that the scope should be all kinds of urban design, not just buildings. And secondly, I knew the stories would need to be a little bit longer than two minutes to be compelling and for the audience to really fall in love with these tiny mundane details. So I advocated for the stories to be four and a half minutes long. That's what I felt was the difference between like a story and love a story. Two and a half minutes. I had no idea how long 99% of visible episodes would eventually become, but at the time I

was making a tiny radio show about design that would fit into a very crowded radio broadcast clock. So the running time of the episode was of paramount concern. This is all preamble to the room I mentioned a minute ago, the room where the show really began. In the offices of the American Institute of Architects, the executive director Margie O'Drisko gathered for me a group of designers of

all kinds. There was a prominent architect, a structural engineer, a landscape architect, a product designer, and I asked them what it meant to be a designer. I was looking for insight about how they saw the world. I was looking for leads for stories that I should follow. But most of all, I was looking for a name. I knew I didn't want the word design in the title of the show. I don't know why I was so against that, but I was certain of that. In an effort to brainstorm a name for the show,

I asked them if there was a certain set of protocols or processes that they all shared, something that unified them, like a scientific method. And at some point, we came to the conclusion that if they were all doing their jobs right, it was mostly invisible. And then someone pulled out the book, Massive Change by Bruce Mao.

And on the very first page, printed on the in paperpaper itself, is the line, For most of us, design is invisible until it fails. And then, further in the introduction, there's another sentence about the book's mission as laid out by the architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, Quote, To comprehend the total integrating significance of the 99% invisible activity which is coalescing to reshape our future. When I heard the phrase 99% invisible I knew I had a name and in a way I knew I

had a premise. I would focus on the invisible parts of design, the undernoticed, not the failures, but the good parts. I would highlight the everyday and the boring and the mundane and talk about how this world is full of genius if you just know how to look for it. What I didn't realize then, but something that I came to realize after working on the show for almost 15 years, is that recognizing all the thought and care that goes into everyday objects is actually really important.

It's more important than a podcast. When your eyes are open to those things, you can feel yourself in the embrace of smart people looking out for you. It's a form of gratitude. People who probably weren't all that heralded, designed and made all the things that make your life possible. It's also important to stop and recognize the everyday so that the everyday continues to thrive. Like anyone who gets annoyed by a road closure

or a bit of construction that impedes my all-important forward progress, I fail to recognize the world being made better for my benefit right in front of me. Tapping into the spirit of appreciating all the things we make and build for each other is important for getting more of what we need. It's a way to buy into a society that seems like it's ignoring you but actually isn't. Of course, there is bad infrastructure that does harm.

Elliot Kalin and I are spending a whole year talking about a book that covers that in minute detail. But still, on balance, overlooking the functional and good is too easy to do. So we need reminders. Which brings me to the manhole covers in Osaka, Japan. Now, Japan is the most thoughtfully designed place I've ever been to. The simple act of providing clean public restrooms wherever you might need one feels revolutionary in and of itself compared to the dog-eat-dog world of public facilities in the U.S.

But even people in Japan need to be reminded of the miracle of reliable infrastructure. What is probably the loveliest manhole cover ever is located in Osaka, Japan, and it shows a blue Osaka castle in relief, wrapped in blue waves and white cherry blossoms. It looks like an ornately etched wood-bock print, even though it is in fact a manhole cover. This beautiful disc was commissioned in the 1980s to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the modern sewer system. It's strikingly artful, but this design approach is not unique to one city or celebration. Colorful illustrations of flowers and animals

and buildings and bridges and boats and mythical heroes and rising phoenixes all adorn stylized manhole covers across Japan. Now, Japanese cities have had various kinds of sewage and drainage infrastructure for over 2,000 years, but subsurface systems with standardized access points are still a relatively modern phenomenon. With standardization came attempts at creativity.

In the mid-1900s, city-specific covers merged, but these were relatively muted and largely colorless. According to a Tokyo-based association of manhole cover makers, the rise of the more expressive covers started in the 1980s, with a ranking construction ministry bureaucrat named Yasutake Kameda. At the time, just over half of Japanese households were connected to municipal sewer systems. Kameda wanted to raise awareness around this vital water infrastructure, in part, to get locals on board for a modern expansion. It's hard to levy the tax money required to improve and expand these kinds of networks

when they are unseen and underappreciated. So Kameda zeroed in on manhole covers as the obvious target for a visibility campaign, a surface expression of an otherwise underground and largely invisible system. So he began encouraging towns and cities to develop and deploy location-specific motifs, and soon municipalities were competing to create the coolest covers around, drawing inspiration from nature, classic folklore, and contemporary culture, including a Hello Kitty manhole cover. The tactic worked, and Manhoru Mania has since inspired photography and rubbings and pens and stickers and even quilting design books based on the art and design of Japanese manhole

covers. The various designs have some features in common. Complex patterns with lines and curves running in different directions from one another. This cross-hatching offers traction, helping to reduce wheel slippage on wet metal surfaces in rainy or icy conditions. Mini-Manhole covers in Japan have other less visible features designed with safety and quality of life in mind. Tapered designs, which angle inward towards the bottom of the cover, rattle less than conventional round covers with vertical edges when they're driven over,

thus reducing noise pollution. For areas that are prone to flooding, including much of Japan, special hinge lids have been engineered so that the cover can flip up but remain attached to the road and then fall back into place when danger passes. This system helps prevent catastrophic lid launches due to high-pressure buildups, which in turn leave behind potentially deadly empty holes in the street. And yes, there have been people sucked into open manholes. While many of these innovations are regional, many basic aspects of manhole cover design

also have some underappreciated genius. Take the round geometry of most covers. A circle is an amazing shape. A circular lid can't fall into the holes that they cap. A square lid or oval lid could be lifted up and turned sideways and chucked into the hole. Once they're lifted out using a pick point or electromagnetic device, heavy round covers can be rolled along the streets like a wheel. So we should all give a round of applause for circles. And while Japan has become well known for the aesthetics of its manhole covers,

other places have distinctive designs as well, some with regional significance or clever functionality. The triangular manhole covers of Nashville, New Hampshire, for example, point in the direction the subsurface water flows. In Seattle, a series of manhole covers feature embedded city maps. The raised city grid pattern on these also function as a multi-directional anti-slip element. Manhole covers can also be designed to lock into a single right position and function as wayfinding devices, with arrows oriented toward different neighborhoods and other points of interest.

In Berlin, one artist known as D. Rob Dukeren, or the Pirate Printer, rolls paint onto the city's distinctive skyline manhole covers, and then presses down shirts to create casual streetwear. then presses down shirts to create casual streetwear. And I would also argue that the completely standard US metal manhole cover has a real municipal design beauty to it. And even if you can't get excited about that, it's worth getting excited about underground

water and sewage infrastructure. Like if you're at Thanksgiving and you're forced to go around the table and say what you're thankful for, indoor plumbing is a perfect perennial example, even if the manhole covers near your home aren't painted like in Osaka. After the break, an overlooked, brilliantly boring foundational structure that was the bridge to the 20th century. After this. In architecture, the most impressive structures often begin with simple, dependable foundations. They embody a timeless balance and solid frameworks that create space for creativity to flourish. PNC Bank wholeheartedly embraces the concept of being brilliantly boring. Even the most impressive buildings depend on essential but boring elements to achieve their brilliance,

regardless of the building's appearance. There are countless behind-the-scenes components that, though seemingly mundane, are crucial to its stability. This philosophy mirrors what PNC Bank stands for. Just as in architecture, where reliability and consistency pave the way for innovation, they provide financial stability to bolster your aspirations. The best designs aren't always the great leaps forward that wow you with their innovation. They are the things that work, use after use, year after year, things that you do not notice because they work so well. Sometimes boring is the best design.

Embrace the dependability of PNC Bank because much like in architecture and in life, a steadfast foundation empowers you to dream boldly and build with confidence. Find out more about how PNC's boring philosophy for your money can help deliver brilliance to your life. Visit pnc.com slash brilliantly boring to learn more. PNC Bank brilliantly boring since 1865. PNC Bank National Association member FDIC. There's a well-known literary technique called Chekhov's gun, named after the Russian playwright. Basically, if a gun appears in the first act, it better be fired in the following act.

There are no unnecessary details. You see a gun, that gun gets used to shoot someone. I have a corollary principle of my own invention, and it relates to movies where there is a scene at a construction site, and it is this. If on the screen you see an ugly shaft of exposed rebar, somebody's getting impaled. There's something about rebar that fascinates me. If nothing else, because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered. My pathological preoccupation with metal reinforcement bars dovetails nicely

with a structure in San Francisco that I'm pretty obsessed with. A tiny bridge in Golden Gate Park. This is the Alfred Lake Bridge by Ernest Ransom. This is William Lippman. He teaches architecture at the California College of the Arts and he was the first person to tip me off to the importance of this humble little structure on the very eastern edge of the park. It's sort of the entrance to the park from the hate side, from the kind of hippie slacker hate area right at the edge of the park and sort of leading into the children's playground.

It's not a place that most people really want to linger. It is a spot for drug dealing and various illicit assinations. And that is Robert Corlin, author of Concrete Planet, giving us a lay of the land. We're in the Albert Lake Bridge, one of the earliest surviving reinforced concrete structures in the world. The bridge was constructed in 1889.

It may be the least appealing sort of monument of architecture or civil engineering. On one side it's cracked where the earth is sort of pressing through. It's covered in mold and lichen. Inside it's this kind of odd surrealistic tunnel of stalactites that really kind of look like some sort of folk art, you know, impression of what the surface of Mars might look like. I think it looks like the inside of a giant colon. It's really unappealing to pass through it. It's not well kept up at all.

Well, there's nothing remarkable about it. It is an arch. It's actually as much a pedestrian tunnel as a bridge. A pioneering structure in the shape of a dumpy and neglected little bridge. But it's really sad because it is one of the pioneering buildings in the story of reinforced concrete.

There are plenty of candidates for the most overlooked, most invisible part of the built world. But reinforced concrete has a good claim to be the most overlooked, most invisible part of the built world, but reinforced concrete has a good claim to be the most invisible of all. Because if it's made right, you never see the steel skeleton underneath all the concrete structures that you work in drive over or walk under. Reinforced concrete is concrete that is strengthened by the addition of initially iron and then later steel to give it tinsel strength. The thing about concrete is it's great in compression, meaning it withstands a lot of pressure in terms of weight,

but it's not very good in tension, meaning when you sort of spanning long distances, it sort of can collapse. So if you see concrete going high in the air or spanning a long distance, there is metal inside of that. And you have this unassuming vanguard of a bridge and its engineer, Ernest Ransom, to thank for it. Ernest Ransom's principal claim to fame

is that he's the father of modern reinforced concrete. The experiments done with reinforcing concrete with iron previous to Ernst Ransom, were just one-off experiments. A cottage in England, a house in New York, and a rowboat in France. If you're thinking, did he say a reinforced concrete rowboat? That deserves a follow-up question. Well, you'd be right, but I did not think of it at the time. Ernst Ransom experimented with different forms of iron reinforcement until he hit upon what we now call rebar, which is short for reinforcement bar. And his technology was far beyond any

of the others who were experimenting with reinforced concrete at the time. A lot of people in Europe and America are playing with putting in bars or metal into concrete at this time. There's many different techniques and everyone's experimenting. What Ransom's sort of major innovation is, is he takes sort of square bar that runs through it and he twists it slightly,

and that gives it an adhesive quality to the concrete itself. And it sort of stays together much better. Ransom said to come to this idea, he found a twisted rubber band in his pocket one day and thought well that's what I'm gonna do to this iron bar I'm gonna twist it so it just binds to the concrete better. You can see a diagram of this twisted rebar in Ransom's 1884 patent. By the way if you're

anything like me Google patent search is the best way to spend time in front of the computer. I could lose hours jumping from patent to patent. Anyway, this innovation of messing with the bar to help it bond with the surrounding concrete is still used to this day. We put deformations on the reinforcing bar so that the concrete will hold on to it. That scoring is probably why I find rebar

so ugly and unsettling. That's Bob Risser right there. I'm Bob Risser. I'm president and CEO of the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute. He's not the former president, but regardless, I called the CRSI to get the full scope of what reinforced concrete means

to the built world. Well, without over-exaggerating the point, I would say that the significance of reinforced concrete is that modern society is not possible without it. Well, as humble as the Albert Lake Bridge is, it is a direct precursor to the Ingalls skyscraper built just 15 years later in Cincinnati, Ohio, the world's first reinforced concrete skyscraper. It also led to bridges, dams, freeways, streets of reinforced concrete.

I mean without reinforced concrete, you would only be able to build a series of unconnected asphalt roads. It's a very humble beginning, but it was from here in San Francisco that the reinforced concrete revolution took over the world. That's why we talk about it being the foundation of civilization. It's also a foundation of modern architecture. It made possible forms that were never possible before, like Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum and Jeannie Gang's stunning Aqua Tower in Chicago.

It's designed to mimic flowing water on the 80-some floors, there are no two floors that are the same. There's no two balconies that are the same. But the problem with reinforced concrete, especially if the rebar isn't covered with enough concrete and is exposed to water and salt, is that the steel inside can rust. And as it rusts, it expands. It expands to almost fourfold its original

diameter, destroying the concrete around it while the steel itself is being destroyed by the rust and corrosion. And when that happens, which it will eventually, reinforced concrete doesn't last the thousand years that Ernest Ransom and the early reinforced concrete proponents thought it would. For many many years the design life was about 50 years. The entire interstate system was built under the assumption of a 50-year design. These days, our organization and others

are working with the federal government and state agencies to try to look at 75 and even 100-year designs. Modern reinforced concrete frames encased inside a building superstructure with normal maintenance will last a lot, lot longer. So don't worry, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world, and the tallest reinforced concrete structure is not coming down anytime soon. But the clock is ticking for most of the reinforced concrete infrastructure that was put up in

the middle of the 20th century in the US. People have to realize that all this that they see around them will eventually have to be, with a few exceptions, will have to be torn down and replaced because we built with steel reinforced concrete. And the cost of that, it will be trillions of dollars, an unbelievable amount of money. Seriously, the stuff that wasn't properly maintained

is coming down. And as you can imagine, a lot the stuff that wasn't properly maintained is coming down. And as you can imagine, a lot of our infrastructure was not properly maintained. Particularly with public agencies, where very frankly, the method has been and in some cases still is, you know, a reactionary policy rather than a well thoughtthought-out maintenance routine." Even though concrete has the illusion of permanence, it is not that way at all. You don't just build it and forget it. You have to account for going back and taking care of it like you would anything else. Ernest Ransom left San Francisco soon after he completed the Alfred Lake Bridge.

In his book, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, published in 1912, which is not the most scintillating of texts, 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. He left for the East, thinking that his revolution of reinforced concrete would have a better chance out there. He left thinking that no one here would fully appreciate his Albert Lake Bridge, that no one here would appreciate this literal bridge to the modern world. And looking at it today, I'm sad to say that he was right. Life can often surprise you with its unpredictability.

While embracing these surprises can be thrilling, there are aspects where stability is key. You want the stability of a 135-year-old bridge that just does its job while still being a hallmark of innovation. Same goes for your bank. Your bank should be the dependable foundation that allows you the freedom to pursue adventure. PNC Bank understands the importance of reliability in unpredictable world. Embrace the dependability of PNC Bank. By keeping your bank boring, you can make your life

extraordinary. Find out more about how PNC's boring philosophy for your money can help deliver brilliance to your life at pnc.com slash brilliantly boring pnc bank brilliantly boring since 1865 pnc bank national association member fdic 99 invisible was produced this week by me roman Roman Mars, with help from Kurt Kohlstedt. Original music was composed by Swan Real. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Potok, Martin Gonzalez, Chris Berube,

Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivienne Leigh, Lash Madone, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server where we talk about architecture, we talk about movies, we talk about flags, and we definitely, definitely talk about the Power Broker.

There's a link to that every past episode and links to PNC Bank, brilliantly boring, at 99pi.org.