Concrete Architecture

No longer the material of choice for just factories and industrial buildings, concrete is now fashionable and chic, adorning shops, restaurants, homes, and landscapes with its desirable, tactile surfaces. This reversal of fortune can be attributed to its use in luxurious homes and the discovery that concrete can provide stimulating or soothing environments for a range of leisure activities. Organized around the themes of Home, Work, Play, and Landscape, all the examples chosen celebrate the intrinsic qualities of concrete and how they work to make the places in which we live, work, and play and to shape the wider landscape that surrounds us. A range of projects from around the world includes a private house in Osaka by Tadao Ando, Canary Wharf Underground Station in London by Foster and Partners, the Museum of Asian Art in Paris by Henri and Bruno Gaudin, and recent work by Morphosis and Antoine Predock in the United States.