Main entry:

Palley, Reese.

Title & Author:

Concrete : a seven-thousand-year history / Reese Palley.

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication:

New York : The Quantuck Lane Press, 2010.

Description:

232 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (page 228) and index.
The great agglomeration -- Between Egypt and Rome -- Roman concrete and its impact on world history -- Vitruvius and Giocondo, 1445-1525 -- Joseph Moxon, 1627-1691 -- Concrete in the eighteenth century -- The twentieth century -- The wizard of Menlo Park -- What is art? -- Flagler's folly -- A woeful century -- The industry -- Lunar transit -- Epilogue.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

"Concrete runs through the history of human affairs, linking our most distant past to the present and our future in space. Emerging from ancient primitive desert cultures, the conceit that stone could be made by man was a concept that powered tremendous cultural and economic movements. Reese Palley's fascinating history of this infinitely versatile material chronicles the repeated and often centuries-long losses of the technology, its many re-emergences, and the cultural, scientific, geopolitical, and engineering accomplishments it has enabled." "Seven thousand years ago, an Egyptian architect-priest made a discovery that would eventually plot the course of human progress. It was evening and the dinner fire was heating up the limestone chips scattered about by his stone masons; the burned chips had been reduced to a powder and when the fire was quenched with water, what had been a sort of mud in the evening turned into stone by morning." "By this serendipitous accident empires would rise and fall with the presence or absence of concrete as man inexplicably forgot and then remembered and then forgot how to make the miracle substance. After the demise of the Roman Empire (which itself was accidentally enabled by a waterproof concrete fashioned out of the ash that buried Pompeii) the art of concrete was lost for centuries until, in the Dark Ages, the ancient Roman formula was discovered in an obscure monastery in Switzerland only to be immediately forgotten for another three hundred years." "Palle carries us forward to our time when, almost without notice, the earth is being mantled by concrete and the barren landscapes of the moon are being scrutinized for the makings of lunar concrete to house the colonizers who are surely coming. Concrete recounts the blessings and the curses, the dangers and delights, of what is, save for fire, the most ubiquitous of all of man's discoveries."--Jacket.

ISBN:

9781593720391 (hbk.)
1593720394 (hbk.)

Subject:

Concrete History.
Béton Histoire.
Concrete.

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 275416
Call No.: TA439 .P35 2010
Status: Available