Concrete
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
Concrete
Pre-order Now for £17.99
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Stephen Parnell
Concrete has an image problem. Portrayed as boring, cheap, and thoughtless, it is often considered synonymous with bad architecture. For many, concrete is architecture gone wrong – dogmatic, ugly, and as miserably grey as English drizzle.
Stephen Parnell’s Concrete is an apologia of concrete, second only to water as the world’s most consumed material. From the personal, intimate scale of jewelry to the monumental scale of Brutalist architecture, Parnell explores the personality of concrete and how it is embedded and embodied in everyday and familiar objects. He revels in concrete’s ambiguity and contradictory qualities, from its sensitivity to the tiniest imprint to its immense compressive strength in hydroelectric dams, and traces how concrete is both the ultimate unaesthetic material as well as the quintessential building block of modernity.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
Continue the series
Critic reviews
Concrete has been accused of crimes from vulgarity to enabling the climate crisis. Parnell has assembled an excellent, nuanced case for its defence, arguing incisively for a richer understanding of this most divisive and paradoxical of substances, but also for both it and its creators to urgently change their ways.
No reviews yet