EARLY in the 20th century, people with avant-garde taste could fill their homes with music played on concrete gramophones. Designed by Thomas Edison, this was one of many concrete furnishings the inventor intended for the futuristic concrete houses he built in Union, New Jersey.
Beginning in the neolithic period, Reese Palley delightfully traces the mix of innovation and impudence that make up the 7000-year history of artificial stone. While he is attentive to the environmental impact of massive concrete structures such as the Three Gorges dam in China, he ultimately sees concrete as 鈥渙ur ecological lifeboat鈥�, noting new formulations that take toxic chemicals from water and air. His narrative, however, suggests a less felicitous future in which the hubris that has grown with our ability to hijack geology gives new meaning to another Edison invention: the concrete tombstone.
Concrete: A seven-thousand year history
W.W. Norton