Mother Jones
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Radio host Roman Mars, creator of the architecture-and-design podcast 99% Invisible, wasn’t always interested in the structures around him—”I found architecture kind of distancing, quite honestly,” he says—until the day he embarked on a boat tour of Chicago. The guide pointed out how one of the Montgomery Ward buildings was explicitly designed without corner offices to prevent squabbling among company vice-presidents over who should get one. It “made me realize I wasn’t invested in the aesthetics of buildings, but I loved the stories of buildings a whole lot.”
In 2010, when an architecture trade group partnered with San Francisco radio station KALW to launch a bite-size design segment, Mars, who’d gotten his start at the station nine years earlier, jumped in to produce. Soon he was doing longer stories about things most if us take for granted: a decrepit bridge in Golden Gate Park, highway stripes, the modern toothbrush, the dark logic of solitary-confinement cells.
Source:
Roman Mars on the Secret Allure of Highway Stripes and Manhole Covers
