Status Updates From Concrete and Culture: A Mat...

'Only a fraction of the world's concrete is touched by architects, but their impact on the medium has been disproportionate to the very slight control that they have over the totality of what is built the world over.'

'Compared to the all-or-nothing attitude towards the use of concrete that was characteristic of the 1950s '60s, now it is common to find the concrete only partially exposed and occupying a more subtle and ambiguous role in the total ensemble.'

'It is much more rare than it was to see concrete being used to demonstrate technical innovation.'

Those who, like Gio Ponti', have confidently asserted that concrete is 'colorless' have merely been lazy with their eyes. That is why I choose to photograph concrete in colour.

'For many mid-twentieth century architects, the quality of architecture lay not in the thing, but in the idea.'

'The anaesthetic of concrete deserves closer attention.'

'The immediate architectural reason for the re-emergence of concrete in the early 1990s was as a reaction to post-modernism.'

'Whatever critics thought of the results, the New Photography freed photography from pictorial ism, and in this the subject matter provided by new concrete structures had been of service.'

'Concrete and human flesh, two ideal surfaces to demonstrate the medium of photography'

'Although the story of the appropriation of industrial structures by modern architecture is now well known, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was through photographs that the transaction took place: it was the images of structures, not the structures themselves, that sustained the argument.'

'In reinforced concrete's success, photography played an important, and in some people's opinion, indispensable role.'

'Of all the occupations involved in building, architects are the group for whom there is most doubt whether concrete has enhanced, or weakened, their position.'

'Frequently the province of low-status immigrant labour - Italian in the U. S., Irish or West Indian in Britain, Algerian or Portuguese in France - concrete is low down in the hierarchy of building trades.'