The 99% Invisible City doesn’t truly emulate a classic field guide.

More recently, the field guide template has been used to help people identify everything from shipping containers to the symbolism of lucid dreams. “So much of the conversation about design centers on beauty,” Mars and Kohlstedt write, “but the more fascinating stories of the built world are about problem-solving, historical constraints, and human drama.”Īs its subtitle suggests, the book models itself as a sort of “field guide,” previously the purview of zoologists and botanists for creating visual taxonomies of the natural world. From imported squirrels to wheelchair ramps, fire escapes to municipal flags, highway numbering systems to wastewater river reversals, the authors find unexpected meaning in everyday infrastructure. Prosaic as they may seem, their function and utility can be profound. Both center around the idea that most elements of urban design - whether industrial, consumer, or civic - are hidden in plain view. The 99% Invisible City is an offshoot of Mars’s popular podcast on design and architecture, 99% Invisible, and many of the book’s entries were originally featured as stories on the podcast, which is now in its 11th year. Mars and Kohlstedt argue these coding systems not only “provide essential information to diggers” but also serve as “ephemeral windows for the rest of us into the complex systems running right beneath our feet.” In their new book, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, the authors lucidly explain, among other ubiquitous but little-understood elements of urban planning, what different colors correspond to: red indicates an electric power line green marks sewage and drain pipes orange refers to telecommunications and signal wiring. Most laypeople wouldn’t be able to decipher their meanings but Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt want to change that. Odds are, you’ve seen this system at work but have paid it little attention, especially since it often takes the form of colorful but cryptic regulatory graffiti: lines, shapes, and figures, drawn on the ground with chalk or paint.

The Venice Boulevard blast accelerated that process and within a few years, a standardized coding system emerged, still used to this day. Earlier in the ’70s, the American Public Works Association had already been discussing a “uniform color code” system to help label the locations and type of different wiring and piping. Test borings done in 1975 indicated that the Standard Oil pipeline was 18 to 20 inches below the road bed but in reality, it was far closer to the surface when the trenching machine plowed into it. The explosion, which killed nine and injured over twice as many, was the result of road workers’ estimations being “18 inches wrong,” according to initial conclusions by the National Transportation Safety Board. Eyewitnesses described a horrific scene, reporting that workers in a nearby drapery store “ran screaming into the street with their clothes and hair on fire.” The late edition of the Los Angeles Times ran the accident as its lead story, emblazoned with the headline, “WEST L.A. The resulting explosion sent fireballs into the sky and leveled the entire north side of the block. ON JUNE 16, 1976, at 10:34 a.m., an excavation machine helping to widen the 7500 block of Venice Boulevard at Cardiff Avenue in Culver City accidentally struck an eight-inch underground gas pipeline.

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