Book review: 100 Contemporary Concrete Buildings - concrete's finer side
Concrete is the most maligned of building materials, shorthand for man-made soullessness. The stuff of which cities are made, it's cheap, it's everywhere, and it goes into the making of nearly all of our most unappealing buildings. Yet it's also the most versatile and malleable of materials, and has been used in architectural masterpieces.
Concrete is the most maligned of building materials, shorthand for man-made soullessness. The stuff of which cities are made, it's cheap, it's everywhere, and it goes into the making of nearly all of our most unappealing buildings. Yet it's also the most versatile and malleable of materials, and has been used in architectural masterpieces.
100 Contemporary Concrete Buildings showcases some of them.
It may seem quintessentially modern, but concrete has ancient origins; the Roman Pantheon, for example, is mostly made from it. The invention of reinforced concrete in the late 19th century, though, paved the way for an explosion in concrete buildings throughout the 20th, from the banal to the sublime. Concrete's more enticing possibilities were first explored in 1913 with Paris' Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the material has since been used in everything from the Sydney Opera House to the Bilbao Guggenheim.
100 Contemporary Concrete Buildings, produced in Taschen's lavish and professional style - and so large and heavy, it feels as if it's made of the material - features buildings designed by 73 modern architectural galácticos including Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Oscar Niemeyer and Renzo Piano. (There are also several from China, including Beijing's Pei Zhu, Shenzhen's Urbanus and Vancouver-based Bing Thom.)
Split into two giant coffee-table hardbacks, it features a chunky section on each of the buildings starting with a fact-heavy architect bio, a brief write-up about the building and several pages of beautifully shot, well-captioned photos, plus architectural drawings. Many of the projects are physically imposing: Singapore's Marina Bay Sands resort by Moshe Safdie, for example, with its gravity-defying Skypark; or Ando's Roberto Garza Sada Centre for Arts, Architecture and Design in Monterrey, Mexico - a vast, soaring slab that fans out above a bucolic landscape in a kind of anti-brutalist monumentalism, finding the beauty in concrete rather than embracing its ugliness.