This book fully succeeds in portraying the most emblematic material of modern culture. Concrete is seemingly condemned to transformations, easily slipping into the role of timber or stone, with no clear identity of its own. With his engaging scholarship, Adrian Forty takes us beyond the merely concrete, showing a material that does not fit into pre-cast categories, as a projection ... Read morescreen of Japanese, Brazilian or Swiss identities, of fears and pleasures, a source of dislike and fascination since its invention.
kos Morav nszky, ETH Zurich This erudite, insightful and wide-ranging study takes the field of material history in new directions. By focusing on concrete
the ubiquitous marker of modernity
we are taken through a labyrinth of intersecting cultural and political developments that range across architecture, cinema, photography, planning, and a host of other fields.
Matthew Gandy, University College London Forty offers a historical account of how concrete has played a part in humans' relationship to their physical surroundings and the global consequences. By taking into account the role concrete has played in areas like politics, literature, cinema, and sustainability, he gives readers a new viewpoint about this material.
Choice Fascinating. . . . Forty shows in arresting detail that constructing in reinforced concrete was no less industrialized, with the companies that had patented reinforced concrete systems, and their desk-bound engineers, orchestrating events on faraway sites.
Times Literary Supplement Forty admits that he initially saw Concrete and Culture as an 'entertainment', an enjoyable project that allowed him to travel globally, but that he ended up grappling with a set of problems that were both intellectually difficult and full of rich cultural associations. Taking on a topic that has for the most part
until very recently
been the subject of technical literature, he again shows us a new way of looking at modernity, via one of its most characteristic material manifestations.
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