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.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Stephen Parnell is senior lecturer in architecture at Newcastle University and Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Journal of Architecture. He has written over 130 articles on architecture, has been a columnist for the Architects’ Journal, and a contributing editor for Architectural Review.

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