Design

29 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it.

Florence built a cathedral with a gaping hole where its dome should beBy the early 1400s Florence's cathedral had been rising for a century, yet it still had no roof over its crossing. The planned octagonal dome was wider and taller than anything ev…
The Great Wall is many walls, and Marco Polo never mentioned anyThere was never one Great Wall. Rival states started building border walls in the 7th century BC, the First Emperor stitched some together, and later dynasties added their own. Th…
Europe holds more than 35,000 prehistoric structures built from giant stonesFrom Sweden to the Mediterranean, over 35,000 megalithic monuments dot Europe, and the tradition is far older than Stonehenge. Carved pillars at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey date to aro…
Burning old tally sticks destroyed Britain's medieval Parliament in one nightOn 16 October 1834, workers fed a stove with the Exchequer's obsolete wooden tally sticks. It overheated, set the Lords chamber alight, and most of the medieval Palace of Westmins…
Designers use the word 'affordance' in a way its inventor never meant.The psychologist James Gibson coined 'affordance' for what the environment offers an animal: a step affords climbing to an adult, but not to a crawling baby. Don Norman borrowed i…
The barcode began as Morse code drawn in beach sand.In the late 1940s, Norman Woodland, trying to solve a supermarket's checkout problem, drew Morse code in the sand on a Florida beach and stretched its dots and dashes into thin an…
The world's most famous architecture school didn't teach architecture for its first eight years.The Bauhaus lasted just 14 years, moved city twice, had three directors, and closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure. Its manifesto said all creative work aimed at building, yet it off…
Brutalism isn't named for being brutal.The name sounds like a verdict, but it comes from a Swedish architect's term, 'nybrutalism', and got linked to the French béton brut, 'raw concrete'. The style aimed at honest, af…
Hang a chain, flip the curve upside down, and you have a perfect arch.In 1675 Robert Hooke claimed he had found the ideal shape for an arch, and published it as a scrambled Latin anagram. Decoded after his death, it read: as hangs a flexible cable, …
Comic Sans was drawn for cartoon characters, and it may help some readers.In 1994 a Microsoft designer saw cartoon characters in beginners' software speaking in Times New Roman and thought it looked absurdly formal. He drew a typeface based on comic boo…
A Braun designer's ten rules of good design live on in Apple's gadgets.Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun for decades, summed up his philosophy as 'less, but better'. His ten principles of good design became a creed for product designers. Apple's J…
Paris's greatest artists signed a petition against the Eiffel Tower.In 1887 a 'Committee of Three Hundred', one member per metre of the planned tower, called it useless and monstrous. It was meant to be temporary and due for dismantling in 1909. I…
Frank Lloyd Wright put the house on the waterfall so you couldn't see it.The Kaufmann family expected their weekend house to face the falls on Bear Run. Wright built it right on top of them instead: 'I want you to live with the waterfall, not to look a…
Le Corbusier called a house a 'machine for living in'. His masterpiece leaked so badly its owners left.In 1927 Le Corbusier set out five rules for modern architecture made possible by reinforced concrete: stilts, roof gardens, open plans, ribbon windows and free facades. The Villa …
Gothic cathedrals got their huge windows by pushing their supports outside.A stone vault pushes its walls outward, so early churches needed thick walls with small windows. The flying buttress, an arch leaping from the upper wall to a heavy pier standing …
The architect who coined 'form follows function' covered his buildings in ornament.Louis Sullivan wrote the phrase in 1896, and modernists turned it into a war cry against decoration. But Sullivan's own Chicago buildings erupted with lush ironwork and terracotta…
Futura, built from circles and triangles, was sold as 'the typeface of our time'.In 1927 the German designer Paul Renner released a typeface made from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. It was marketed as the face of the future, copied by rival found…
The golden ratio isn't hiding in the Parthenon.You've probably heard that the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa and your perfect face all follow the 'divine' proportion of about 1.618. Mathematicians who have checked say most of these …
The world's most famous typeface was designed to look like nothing.Helvetica began in 1957 as 'Neue Haas Grotesk', drawn by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at a Swiss type foundry. It was renamed Helvetica, Latin for 'Swiss', to sell abroad. It…
The Leaning Tower of Pisa survived because its builders kept going to war.Pisa's bell tower started sinking in 1178, when only two floors were built, on a foundation just three metres deep. Then construction stopped for almost a century while Pisa fough…
The world's most common chair costs a few dollars and has no clear inventor.The white plastic Monobloc is squirted into a mould as a single piece of molten polypropylene. Billions have been made, at around 3.50 dollars each. It is loved as perfect design …
The honeycomb ceilings of Islamic architecture solve the problem of putting a dome on a square room.Muqarnas are tiers of tiny niches stacked and projecting over one another, like a honeycomb or stalactites. Built from a small set of simple shapes combined by strict geometric ru…
Norway celebrates inventing the paper clip. It didn't.Norway has a giant paper-clip monument, a commemorative stamp and a national hero, Johan Vaaler, credited with the invention. But Vaaler's 1899 design was clumsier than the 'Gem' …
The Post-it Note came from a failed attempt to make super-strong glue.In 1968 a 3M chemist trying to make a very strong adhesive made a weak, reusable one instead. For years nobody wanted it. Then a colleague needed a bookmark that wouldn't fall out…
Why is your keyboard laid out so strangely?QWERTY was developed in the 1870s for Christopher Latham Sholes's typewriter. The popular story says it was designed to slow typists and stop keys jamming. The truth is murkier, b…
Roman concrete could heal its own cracks, and some has lasted 2,000 years in the sea.Modern concrete exposed to seawater can deteriorate within decades. Roman harbour concrete has survived two millennia. Research suggests seawater reacting with volcanic ash grew r…
Your phone's camera click is the ghost of a shutter that isn't there.A skeuomorph is a design detail kept from an older version of an object after its purpose has gone: the camera click on a phone, the floppy-disk 'save' icon, the grille on an elec…
The architect of the Sydney Opera House never saw it finished.Jørn Utzon's sketchy competition drawings won in 1957. The build ran ten years late and more than 1,300 percent over budget in real terms. Utzon resigned in 1966, left Australia a…
The London Tube map works because it deliberately lies about geography.In 1931 Harry Beck, an Underground employee working in his spare time, realised underground passengers don't care where stations really are, only how they connect. He drew the net…

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