Brilliantly Boring

ROMAN MARS: 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% Invisible, 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/brilliantlyboring. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. PNC Bank National Association. Member FDIC.

This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. I am going to 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 one to two 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% Invisible 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 or the show really began. In the offices of the American Institute of Architects, the executive director, Margie O’Driscoll, gathered for me a group of designers of all kinds. There was a prominent architect, a structural engineer, a landscape architect, and 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, I 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 Mau. And on the very first page, printed on the endpaper 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. “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 under-noticed–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. Elliott Kalan 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 woodblock 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 emerged. But these are 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, we began encouraging towns and cities to develop and deploy location-specific motifs. And soon municipalities were competing to create the coolest around, drawing inspiration from nature, classic folklore, and contemporary culture, including a Hello Kitty manhole cover. The tactic worked and monholer mania has since inspired photography and rubbings and pins 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 crosshatching offers traction, helping to reduce wheel slippage on wet metal surfaces and rainy or icy conditions.

Many 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. 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 Nashua, New Hampshire, for example, point in the direction of 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 the “Raubdruckerin” or the “Pirate Printer” rolls paint on the city’s distinctive skyline manhole covers and then presses down shirts to create casual street wear.

And I would also argue that the completely standard U.S. 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.

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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.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: This is the Alvord Lake Bridge by Ernest Ransome.

ROMAN MARS: This is William Littman. 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.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: It’s sort of the entrance to the park from the Haight side, from the kind of hippie slacker Haight area, right at the edge of the park, sort of leading into the children’s playground.

ROMAN MARS: It’s not a place that most people really want to linger.

ROBERT COURLAND: It is a spot for drug dealing and various illicit fascinations.

ROMAN MARS: And that is Robert Courland–author of Concrete Planet–giving us a lay of the Land.

ROBERT COURLAND: We’re in the Alvord Lake Bridge, one of the earliest surviving reinforced concrete structures in the world.

ROMAN MARS: The bridge was constructed in 1889.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: 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 looked like some sort of folk art–you know–impression of what the surface of Mars might look like.

ROMAN MARS: I think it looks like the inside of a giant colon.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: It’s really unappealing to pass through it. It’s not well kept up at all.

ROBERT COURLAND: Well, there’s nothing remarkable about it. It is an arched– It’s actually as much a pedestrian tunnel as a bridge.

ROMAN MARS: A pioneering structure in the shape of a dumpy and neglected little bridge.

ROBERT COURLAND: But that’s really sad because it is one of the pioneering buildings in the story of reinforced concrete.

ROMAN MARS: 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 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.

ROBERT COURLAND: Reinforced concrete is concrete that is strengthened by the addition of initially iron and then later steel to give it tensile strength.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: 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… For spanning long distances, it sort of can collapse.

ROMAN MARS: 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 Ransome, to thank for it.

ROBERT COURLAND: Ernest Ransome’s principle claim to fame is that he’s the father of modern reinforced concrete. The experiments done with reinforcing concrete with iron previous to Erenst Ransome were just one-off experiments–a cottage in England, a house in New York, and a rowboat in France.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

ROBERT COURLAND: Ernest Ransome 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.

WILLIAM LITTMAN: 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 Ransome’s major innovation is, is he takes sort of a 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. Ransome 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 going to do to this iron bar. I’m going to twist it so it just binds to the concrete better.”

ROMAN MARS: You can see a diagram of this twisted rebar in Ransome’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.

BOB RISSER: We put deformation on the reinforcing bar so that the concrete will hold onto it.

ROMAN MARS: That scoring is probably why I find rebar so ugly and unsettling. That’s Bob Risser right there.

BOB RISSER: I’m Bob Risser. I’m president and CEO of the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

BOB RISSER: Well, without overexaggerating the point, I would say that the significance of reinforced concrete is that modern society is not possible without it.

ROBERT COURLAND: Well, as humble as the Alvord 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, and streets of reinforced concrete.

BOB RISSER: I mean, without reinforced concrete, you would only be able to build a series of unconnected asphalt roads.

ROBERT COURLAND: It’s a very humble beginning, but it was from here in San Francisco that the reinforced concrete revolution took over the world.

BOB RISSER: That’s why we talk about it being the foundation of civilization.

ROMAN MARS: 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 Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower in Chicago.

BOB RISSER: 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.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

ROBERT COURLAND: 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.

ROMAN MARS: And when that happens–which it will eventually–reinforced concrete doesn’t last the thousand years that Ernest Ransome and the early reinforced concrete proponents thought it would.

BOB RISSER: 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.

ROMAN MARS: Modern reinforced concrete frames encased inside of 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 any time 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 U.S.

ROBERT COURLAND: People have to realize that all this that they see around them will eventually have to be–with a few exceptions–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.

ROMAN MARS: Seriously, the stuff that wasn’t properly maintained is coming down. And as you can imagine, a lot of our infrastructure was not properly maintained.

BOB RISSER: Particularly with public agencies where–very frankly–the method has been and, in some cases, still is a reactionary policy rather than a well thought out maintenance routine.

ROMAN MARS: Even though concrete has the illusion of permanence, it is not that way at all.

BOB RISSER: 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.

ROMAN MARS: Ernest Ransome left San Francisco soon after he completed the Alvord 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 Ransome’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 Alvord 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 an 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/brilliantlyboring. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. PNC Bank National Association. Member FDIC.

99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, with help from Kurt Kohlstedt. Original music was composed by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Neena Pathak, Martín Gonzalez, Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan 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, to every past episode, and to PNC Bank–brilliantly boring–at 99pi.org.