Concrete and Culture

Reviews / Votes

Winner of RIBA President&#39s Award 2013 * Award * Concrete and Culture is divided into thematic chapters, focusing on the materials conjunctions with history, nature, religion, politics, photography, labour and labour relations, and its putative renaissance. Each is full of insights conveyed with a sharp political and architectural intelligence . . . Its hard to imagine a better book on the subject. * Owen Hatherley, <i>Building Design</i> * Concrete and Culture is a good read, rich in enlivening and enlightening detail but with a breadth rarely attempted. Everyone with an interest in architecture since 1900 ought to read it, and everyone who reads it will be left with new knowledge and new challenges to some of their most fundamental architectural assumptions. * Barnabas Calder, <i>Journal of Architecture</i> * This book will change your life if you spend any of it wandering past concrete buildings and hardly noticing them . . . Fortys worldwide research as thorough as his analysis is brilliant leads him to fascinating stories of designers, builders, clients, cultures and politics. The history is well illustrated with photographs in black-and-white or, rather, in delicious tones of concrete grey. * <i>Context</i> * concrete is the quintessential material of architecture. Demanding meticulous pre-planning and design, it forgives nothing and answers only to gravity . . . Concrete is for architects. Without mastering this medium not only technically, but also culturally no architect can surely ever be complete. Concrete and Culture is therefore required reading. * <i>Architects<i></i>Journal</i> * This account of concrete spans centuries and continents, professions and, indeed, media. He considers concrete through film, photography and broader cultural imaginaries, although he does ultimately remain focused on recognisably architectural artefacts . . . Fortys readings of buildings which range from churches to bunkers, east European housing to lost-in-time memorials are always insightful, and sometimes brilliant. * <i>Architectural Review</i> * Concrete and Culture is a study for the ages, as rich and enduring as its subject. * <i>Journal of Architectural Education</i> * The book is carefully knit together, giving a rich sense of the changing status of and associations with concrete over time without being organised in a straightforwardlychronological manner. Nothing is taken for granted in terms of historical development. * <i>Oxford Art Journal</i> * By taking into account the role concrete has played in areas like politics, literature, cinema, and sustainability, [Forty] gives readers a new viewpoint about this material. The book features over 100 black-and-white illustrations portraying a range of concrete edifices from all over the world. Recommended. * <i>Choice</i> * 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 screen of Japanese, Brazilian or Swiss identities, of fears and pleasures, a source of dislike and fascination since its invention. * &#193kos Morav&#225nszky, Professor of Architectural Theory, 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. * Professor Matthew Gandy, Department of Geography, University College London *