99% Invisible, a radio show about design and architecture, recently featured our book HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa on their show, with a companion piece on their blog, along with the book’s trailer:

Here’s an excerpt, and you can listen to the full episode here.

“Akasegawa started noticing similar urban leftovers, and treasured them as artistic byproducts of the city. He photographed all the things he could find that were both vestigial and maintained. He began publishing his findings in a magazine column, accompanied by musings about each object.

People began to send Akasegawa pictures of similar architectural leftovers that they found, and in his column, Akasegawa would judge all submissions on two criteria:

1. Were they truly, completely useless?

2. Were they regularly maintained?

In 1985 Akasegawa published a book of these collected photographs and writings, in which he coined a term for these kinds of urban leftovers. He called them, ‘Thomassons.'”

Continue reading.

The Thomassons trend was picked up on Apartment Therapy, too.