Examining the powerful, civic-minded legacy of Boston's architecture from 1960 until 1976, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston positions the city's architectural production as a seminal case study for the more widespread development of a robust concrete language across the United States. Following several decades of economic and physical stagnation, postwar public investment in Boston catalyzed an era of enormous growth, often through bold buildings that developed a shared concrete vocabulary. The world's leading architects were engaged in these efforts, including Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluis Sert, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, I. M. Pei, Henry N. Cobb, Araldo Cossutta, and the Architects Collaborative. Heroic documents this period through essays by historians, interviews with key architects of the time, and profiles of more than two dozen exceptional buildings. These provide a resource for considering anew the legacies of these works—both troubled and inspired.

Mark Pasnik has been active in public education efforts, preservation initiatives, and the development of research on Boston's concrete architecture since 2006, when he and Chris Grimley produced a show on Boston City Hall following the mayor's call to tear it down. He is codirector of the pinkcomma gallery, a principal of the design firm over,under, and associate professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Pasnik has previously taught at the California College of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon, Northeastern University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2013, he was appointed to the Boston Art Commission and selected for the AIA Young Architects Award.

Michael Kubo is codirector of pinkcomma gallery and a collaborator with over,under, where he is involved in special projects, research initiatives, and curatorial activities. He was associate curator for the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture Program at MIT. His dissertation focuses on the Architects Collaborative and the emergence of collective and corporate architectural practices after the Second World War. He has taught at Pratt Institute, the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and SUNY Buffalo, where he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow.

Chris Grimley is a graphic designer and curator with an education in architecture. His work has been recognized by the AIGA, Print, and How Magazine. He is codirector of over,under's pinkcomma gallery, where he has curated more than thirty exhibitions, including several installations about Boston's legacy of modernism. He cofounded the Design Biennial Boston in 2008, an award program that showcases emerging designers in Massachusetts. Grimley teaches at Northeastern University and has previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Wentworth Institute of Technology.