Concrete

by Stephen Parnell, Ian Bogost (Series Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Series 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.

176 pages, Paperback

Expected publication September 17, 2026

Reviews

[Liralen]

4 stars; review to come September 2026

[Alex Sarll]

"Whether born of utopian dreams or dystopian nightmares, concrete transforms fluid possibility into uncompromising permanence, petrifying whatever hopes and fears we pour into it." Although he talks about his subject as at once ubiquitous and ignored, essential yet unloved, Stephen Parnell is well aware that his Object Lesson arrives at a time when a reassessment is already well underway, to the point that in some circles love letters to brutalist are now as hard to avoid as the style once was. But while we go through some familiar staging posts here (le Corbusier, the undercroft, Ronan Point), and the book would work particularly well as an introduction, it does have enough to still be of interest even if you've already read your John Grindrod and done a Barbican tour or two. For one thing, the author is no dilettante, having worked directly with concrete as a slumpy (don't worry, he explains it) when younger. But he also takes a more international approach than you sometimes find in first world accounts, giving Brasilia the space it deserves, and providing an interesting account of 'Africapitalism'. Like many other volumes in the series, at least in their Netgalley ARC form, it could really have done with a closer edit – no matter how bad the geopolitical situation, 'tragedy' on two successive lines won't help matters, and occasionally sentences end up saying the opposite of what's clearly intended. But for the most part he uses language with the same thoughtfulness he wishes more architects would bring to his chosen material. Plus, I never knew that parkour was the creation of (David) Belle and Sebastien (Foucan).