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Concrete New York, a Blue Crow Media guidebook to the city's concrete buildings
Allison C. Meier's guide gathers more than 50 New York buildings in concrete, from Wright's Guggenheim to Nervi's bus station.
New York isn't the first city you'd think of for concrete. Rough brutalist surfaces are fairly rare across the five boroughs, but as Wallpaper*'s Jonathan Bell points out, concrete in its many forms has done a lot to shape the skyline. Blue Crow Media's latest guidebook, Concrete New York, sets out to show how, joining its earlier titles on London, Berlin, Paris and Asia.
The cover is Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, but author Allison C. Meier wanders well beyond the obvious. There's Pier Luigi Nervi's muscular George Washington Bridge Bus Station, Marcel Breuer's Begrisch Hall at Bronx Community College, Paul Rudolph's Tracey Towers in the Bronx, and the rippling wall of the Tribeca Synagogue, which Bell reads as an early, almost Zaha-like play between building and street. The Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science, renovated by Ennead in 2015, makes the cut too.
More than 50 buildings feature, some friendly and some faintly sinister, all photographed in black and white by Jason R. Woods. The selection comes right up to date with work by Studio Gang, David Adjaye and Steven Holl. The book costs £24 from Blue Crow Media and pairs well with the publisher's Concrete New York Map. A good one to pack if you like to plan a trip around buildings rather than shops.
Our summary of a story from Wallpaper*, published 1 November 2026. Read the original
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From Wallpaper*