Event details
Oct
29
After Concrete: Book Launch & Roundtable
After Concrete: Book Launch and Roundtable
Concrete has been central to modern architecture for over a century, yet its environmental impacts raise urgent questions about its future. After Concrete: Rethinking the Dynamics of a Material (Birkhäuser, 2026) brings together essays by interdisciplinary scholars to examine concrete’s next chapter, investigating how its sustainability will draw both from innovative research and past solutions.
On October 29, 2026, at the Princeton University School of Architecture, the book’s three co-editors—Lucia Allais, Michael Faciejew, and Forrest Meggers—will discuss the volume and its proposition that addressing concrete’s environmental consequences requires a fundamental reconsideration of the assumptions and practices that shape how we build. Allais and Meggers previously convened at Princeton in 2020 for “Rethinking Concrete: Material Conventions in the Anthropocene,” a conference they co-organized to explore concrete, material culture, and the ecological conditions of the anthropocene and that laid groundwork for the book’s premise.
Joining the editors for a response and conversation will be Erin Besler, Billy Fleming, and After Concrete contributor Claire E. White. Together, the participants will consider how architecture might reimagine the material, technological, and historical conventions that have made concrete so indispensable. The event will conclude with an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.
Concrete has been central to modern architecture for over a century, yet its environmental impacts raise urgent questions about its future. After Concrete: Rethinking the Dynamics of a Material (Birkhäuser, 2026) brings together essays by interdisciplinary scholars to examine concrete’s next chapter, investigating how its sustainability will draw both from innovative research and past solutions.
On October 29, 2026, at the Princeton University School of Architecture, the book’s three co-editors—Lucia Allais, Michael Faciejew, and Forrest Meggers—will discuss the volume and its proposition that addressing concrete’s environmental consequences requires a fundamental reconsideration of the assumptions and practices that shape how we build. Allais and Meggers previously convened at Princeton in 2020 for “Rethinking Concrete: Material Conventions in the Anthropocene,” a conference they co-organized to explore concrete, material culture, and the ecological conditions of the anthropocene and that laid groundwork for the book’s premise.
Joining the editors for a response and conversation will be Erin Besler, Billy Fleming, and After Concrete contributor Claire E. White. Together, the participants will consider how architecture might reimagine the material, technological, and historical conventions that have made concrete so indispensable. The event will conclude with an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.
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