A Field Guide to Concrete

A field guide is a strange object to design because almost nobody reads one in order. The publisher's brief asked for a book about concrete for people who look at buildings. What it actually needed to be was a reference that survives being opened at random on a pavement, in bad light, by someone holding a coffee.

Everything in the guide is therefore built around the recto page as a self-contained unit. Each spread covers one condition — a surface treatment, a joint, a failure mode — with the photograph on the left and the explanation on the right, and no entry is ever allowed to run over. That constraint cost the author roughly forty thousand words and produced, by his own account, the best writing in the book.

The running heads carry more information than they usually would: era, technique family and page range, so that a reader who opens the book cold can orient in about two seconds. The index is set in the same size as the body rather than the customary two points smaller, which made it eleven pages longer and immeasurably more usable. And the plate captions carry photographer, location and year in a fixed order, because a field guide that cannot be fact-checked is a picture book.

Materially it is a plain object: a sewn paperback with a heavy uncoated cover that takes fingerprints and gets better for it, printed in one colour plus black so the aggregate photography holds its greys. The second edition added a wipe-clean flap after enough readers reported using it in genuinely wet conditions, which we take as the best review the book received.