Concrete
Object Lessons (Related to this series)
- Author Stephen Parnell
- Narrator Matt Addis
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 13 August 2026
- Run Time 4 hours and 37 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Building construction and materials, History of architecture, Literary theory, Philosophy: aesthetics.
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What to expect
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.
Critics Review
| Author | Stephen Parnell |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Matt Addis |
| Series | Object Lessons |
| Duration | 4 hours and 37 minutes |
| Release Date | |
| ISBN | 9798216477440 |
| Format | Audiobook |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Genre | Building construction and materials, History of architecture, Literary theory, Philosophy: aesthetics |
| Availability | AU, GB, IE, US |
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