Concrete
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Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
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.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- PDF/UA-2, 1.4
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
Has alternative text descriptions for images
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
Table of Contents
2. Structure
3. Space
4. Surface
5. Solid
6. Society
7. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Index
Product details
| Published | Jul 30 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 176 |
| ISBN | 9781501383724 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 18 bw illus |
| Series | Object Lessons |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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