The Iron Curtain, or at least its most visible symbol, was not metal. Berlin’s Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Wall) was concrete. Its ugliness of form and function seemed to many proof of the evils inherent in this ancient building material. But for every hideous Berliner Mauer, you have a glorious Roman Pantheon. The dome of Hadrian’s incomparable temple is, after nearly two millennia, the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the world. 

In our own era, concrete has allowed the best architects to do their best work. Witness  Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel. And who would argue against Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre as the best late-20th-century British building? The shuttering used to contain the poured concrete has acquired the grain of its wooden construction – proof of concrete’s ability to absorb textures and colours to emotional effect. So much care was taken, the architect said, that it would have been cheaper to clad the theatre in Carrara marble – and he confessed to finding the smell of concrete an aphrodisiac.

The cases both for and against concrete are nuanced, as Stephen Parnell, the editor of the RIBA Journal, explains in a very clever book which is neither an apologia nor an attack, but a well-balanced appraisal of this most familiar yet misunderstood composite. One indisputable thing about concrete is its superabundance. According to the US Geological Survey, global annual concrete production is the equivalent of two metric tonnes for every person on the........

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