Concrete and Plastic: Thinking Through Materiality

Plastic and concrete are two of the most important and ubiquitous materials of the modern age. Bringing the two together, this open access book creates and exploits a productive tension between them in order to explore the material conditions of modern life.

From souvenirs to advertisements, environmental art to domestic devices, infrastructure megastructures to body implants, our relations with materials are complicated. Using a wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, advertisements, policy documents and (popular) science writing, this book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to examine the ways in which we invent, and re-invent, the world and worlds we inhabit.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Rostock