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Definition: concrete from Philip's Encyclopedia

Hard, strong building material made by mixing Portland cement, sand, gravel, and water. It is an important building material. Embedded steel rods can reinforce concrete. Pre-stressed concrete contains piano wires instead of steel. Its modern use dates from the early 19th century, although the Romans made extensive use of concrete.

concrete

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
structural masonry material made by mixing broken stone or gravel with sand, cement , and water and allowing the mixture to harden into a solid mass. The cement is the chemically active element, or matrix; the sand and stone are the inert elements, or aggregate. Concrete is adaptable to widely varied structural needs, is available practically anywhere, is fire resistant, and can be used by semiskilled workers. The use of artificial masonry similar to modern concrete dates from a remote period but did not become a standard technique of construction until the Romans adopted it (after the 2d cent. B.C. ) for roads, immense buildings, and engineering works. The concrete of the Romans, formed by combining pozzuolana (a volcanic earth) with lime, broken stones, bricks, and tuff, was easily produced and had great durability (the Pantheon of Rome and the Baths of Caracalla were built with it). Enormous spaces could be roofed without lateral thrusts by vaults cast in the rigid homogeneous…
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Full text Article concrete

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
structural masonry material made by mixing broken stone or gravel with sand, cement , and water and allowing the mixture to harden into a solid mass. The cement is the chemically active element, or matrix; the sand and stone are the inert elements, or aggregate. Concrete is adaptable to widely…
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Full text Article concrete

From The Chambers Dictionary
formed into one mass; real, actual, specific, not abstract, able to be experienced; /kon'/ made of concrete. n /kon'/ a mixture of sand, gravel, etc and cement, used in building; a solid mass formed by parts growing or sticking together. vt /-krēt'/ to form into a solid mass; /kon'/ to cover or fix…
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Full text Article concrete

From The Macquarie Dictionary
constituting an actual thing or instance; real a concrete example. relating to or concerned with realities or actual instances rather than abstractions; particular as opposed to general concrete ideas. representing or applied to an actual substance or thing as opposed to an abstract quality a…
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Sandstone concretion
Colour Similar to host rock. Texture Similar to host rock. Structure Spherical, ellipsoidal, disc-shaped, etc.; with sand crystals the shape is determined by the crystallographic habit of the cementing mineral. Bedding is unbroken from the host rock through the concretion. Concretions vary in size…
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Ever since Willi Guhl's extraordinary Loop Chair made from Eternit was launched in 1955, fibre cement and high-performance concrete have held a special fascination for designers. Yet, it could be argued that little progress, in furniture design at least, has been made until recent years, …
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Full text Article concrete

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
a. Of or relating to an actual, specific thing or instance; particular: had the concrete evidence needed to convict. b. Relating to nouns, such as flower or rain, that denote a material or tangible object or phenomenon. Existing in reality or in real experience; perceptible by the senses; real: …
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Full text Article CONCRETE POETRY

From The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms
Although used in a general way to refer to work that has been composed with specific attention to graphic features such as typography, layout, shape, or distribution on the page, concrete poetry properly understood has a more specific definition created in the mid-1950s by the Swiss-Bolivian poet…
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Some common early twentieth century reinforcing...
Reinforced concrete was in its infancy at the opening of the twentieth century, but it was very quickly adopted worldwide as an economic and versatile construction material. Employing fairly basic materials—sand, crushed stone or gravel, cement, and steel—it found use in all the existing aspects of…
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A complex interplay between societal change, the development of the internal combustion engine, and the impact of World War I, led to an explosion in the number of road vehicles in the immediate postwar years—and a totally inadequate nineteenth century legacy of roads to accommodate them. Following…
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Full text Article CONCRETE POETRY

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
In its narrowest definition, concrete poetry is a type of modernist visual poetry which emerged in the early 1950s and flourished on the fringes of AVANT-GARDE practice throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Invented more or less simultaneously by Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland and the Noigandres group in…
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