By far the most pervasive and affordable building material in the world, concrete has undergone ever-more widespread dissemination, standardization, and technological innovation in the last twenty-five years. Experts consider it the quintessential "engineered" material - it can be designed to satisfy almost any reasonable set of performance specifications, with recent scientific breakthroughs yielding composites stronger than steel, lighter than water, and as beautiful as natural stone. An interdisciplinary group of architects, historians, theorists, engineers, fabricators, and materials scientists collectively explore the past, present, and future possibilities of this highly calibrated, fluid material. Due to its potentially infinite number of permutations in strength, density, thickness, texture, and continuity, concrete exists in a never-ending state of reinvention, limited only by the architect's imagination. Presents new theoretical and cultural analyses of concrete architecture, both historically and in the context of newly built work, by Sanford Kwinter, Antoine Picon, Detlef Mertins, Toshiko Mori, Qingyung Ma, Bernard Tschumi, and many others. It presents a portfolio of recent and forthcoming achievements in ferro-concrete by architects such as Steven Holl, Preston Scott Cohen, reiser + umemoto, and Fernando Menis. And it features the latest advancements in materials science, tensile strength, energy expenditure, and sustainability, as presented by experts in the field, including Guy Nordenson, Hans Schober, Werner Sobek, Surendra Sha, Jacques Ferrier, and Matthias Schuler.
