Concrete - Paperback

Name: Concrete - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9781501383700
Price: 16.15 USD
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by Stephen Parnell

$16.15

Book Overview

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by Stephen Parnell (Author), Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Stephen Parnell is an independent architectural writer and historian of modern architecture. He has been an architect, academic, and editor-in-chief of the Royal Institute of British Architects' Journal of Architecture.

Number of Pages: 192

Dimensions: 0.61 x 6.41 x 4.81 IN

Publication Date: September 17, 2026

ISBN	9781501383700
Author	Stephen Parnell
Publisher	Bloomsbury Academic
Genre	Literature, Design, and Philosophy
Format	Paperback
Published	September 2026
Language	ENG- English
Pages	192
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print