Concrete
Stephen Parnell
Aug 2026 · Bloomsbury US Audio · Narrated by Matt Addis
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4 hr 36 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Bloomsbury presents Concrete by Stephen Parnell, read by Matt Addis.
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.
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.
Bloomsbury presents Concrete by Stephen Parnell, read by Matt Addis.
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 ...
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About the author
Stephen Parnell is an independent architectural writer and historian of modern architecture. He has been an architect, academic, and editor-in-chief of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Journal of Architecture.
Stephen Parnell is an independent architectural writer and historian of modern architecture. He has been an architect, academic, and editor-in-chief of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Journal of Architecture.
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