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Concrete and Culture: A Material History. By Adrian Forty. London: Reaktion Books, 2012; distributed by University of Chicago Press. Pp. 335. $40.
In recent years, concrete has increasingly drawn attention from architecture, business, technology, and labor historians. Happily for those of us fascinated by the stuff, Adrian Forty's cultural history of concrete represents still another disciplinary embrace of this ubiquitous material, in this case as an object of critical praise, distaste, and general aesthetic curiosity over the last century. With this book in hand we can now ask something of a meta-question: Among arbiters of culture, who has cared about concrete, and why?
Forty writes about architects, builders, photographers, critics, entrepreneurs, and politicians who have engaged with the material since its commercial introduction around 1900, covering global contexts both developed and developing. He considers the highest of high design (concrete structures by Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret, Louis Kahn, Moshe Safdie, Rachel Whiteread, and others) alongside the routine and anonymous (Estonian telegraph poles and modest favela homes). The book describes disparate ideological drivers behind concrete's expansion in the twentieth century, ranging from American capitalists to Communist leaders to the Catholic Church, tracing the value of the material to cultural...