Concrete takes a fresh look at the world’s most versatile and abundant building material. Collating fascinating and beautiful concrete buildings by some of the most celebrated architects of the last century, it features familiar projects from Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright alongside work from some of the leading lights of contemporary architecture including Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, and many lesser-known newcomers.
Arranged to promote comparison and discussion, the selected projects take the reader on a global tour of inspiring and intriguing structures: a German skatepark sits beside an Italian rooftop test track, a Japanese crematorium alongside a Portuguese swimming pool and a Brazilian government building next to a Chinese opera house.
Illustrated with extraordinary photographs, each project includes an extended caption providing a commentary on the building.
An essay by Leonard Koren, author of the best-selling Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, offers an evocative and perceptive view of concrete through the author’s experience of studying architecture in California and living in Tokyo.
Concrete is a beautiful and informative visual exploration of a material often considered dull and cold but actually full of spectacular potential.
Concrete
edited by William Hall
with an essay by Leonard Koren
(2012)
The Book | In Praise of Concrete
Esquire
http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/413/the-book-in-praise-of-concrete/
Don’t be swayed by thoughts of multi-story carparks – concrete is a building material capable of feats of great beauty, as a breathtaking new book illustrates.
CONCRETE, edited by acclaimed graphic designer William Hall, collates images of some of the finest architectural works ever built from aggregate, cement and water, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro (above) designed by Oscar Niemeyer, to OMA’s amazingly airy concrete house in Bordeaux (created for a wheelchair-bound client) and London Zoo’s iconic penguin pool, designed by Berthold Lubetkin (though its former inhabitants have now been re-homed in the zoo’s new and rather less elegant “Penguin Beach”). It all makes bricks and mortar look hopelessly ordinary and shows you that where innovative architecture is concerned, grey matters.
Teshima Art Museum, Teshima, Japan, 2010, designed by Ryue Nishizawa (photograph courtesy of Noburu Morikawa)