A new movie reveals the most disliked substance on earth

The concrete world is so immense that most attempts to tackle the subject, including Robert Courland’s definitive 424-page book Concrete Planet, go big.

They talk about how concrete is the defining material of modernity, how it spans the globe and civilisations, and how it contributes enormously to global warming (in the manufacture of cement) and coastal erosion (a byproduct of concrete’s insatiable demand for sand).

It’s easy to see why: The numbers associated with concrete are mind-bogglingly enormous. As Ted C Fishman reported for Bloomberg Businessweek in his own 11 500-word story, it’s a market of $1.4 trillion per year; it accounts for more than half of all the stuff, by weight, that humans have created over the past couple of thousand years; and we collectively produce more than three tons of concrete per human being on the planet every year.

China’s $167 billion Medog Hydropower Station alone is going to use an estimated 300 million tons of concrete by 2033.

The freshness of the documentary The History of Concrete, which premieres in New York on 16 September, is that filmmaker John Wilson, whose TV series How To with John Wilson had three successful seasons on HBO, doesn’t go big.

Don’t be misled by its title: With the exception of a few seconds’ worth of the Pantheon and the Hoover Dam, and a quick shot of a highway interchange, this film isn’t designed to awe you with concrete’s world-transforming power.

Courland’s book does get a very brief shout-out, but the movie’s focus, insofar as it has anything to do with concrete at all, is the way in which concrete fails us in our everyday lives.

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Think less planetary destruction and more annoying cracks in the sidewalk.

Read: Flat-packed cities: wooden skyscrapers sprout over concrete concerns

Concrete as lens on modern life

Wilson is a master at taking something quotidian, such as concrete, and using it as a jumping-off point for a discursive and digressive visual essay on the quirks and absurdities of modern life.

The 102-minute runtime of this film, his first feature, allows him enough space that the main character in the movie (besides Wilson himself) doesn’t even appear until more than halfway through.

That said, perhaps the real main character is you, the viewer – Wilson constantly refers to himself in the second person, a subtle way of making us feel as though the indignities he suffers through are our own, and that many of them are caused, one way or another, by concrete.

At one point, Wilson travels to Bellefontaine, Ohio, to drive down Court Avenue, the oldest concrete street in America; he finds it falling apart. (The burghers of Rome can be thankful that the Pantheon hasn’t had to endure decades of being driven on by two-ton pickup trucks.)

He spends a lot of time in his own Brooklyn home, worrying about water leaking through the concrete floor of his basement or watching municipal workers fixing the sidewalk slabs in front of his window.

His camera lingers on the yellow tape marking trip hazards, the disintegration of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the cracks marring the white concrete surface of Rafael Viñoly’s New York “skinnyscraper” at 432 Park Avenue.

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He interviews a woman who drops out of an endurance race because the concrete she’s running on was too hard; he also casts a skeptical eye on the pro-construction agenda of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Wilson is a man who knows concrete, but, like much of the rest of the country, he doesn’t much seem to like concrete, which, as building materials go, is pretty unlovable, hard and unforgiving rather than organic and beautiful.

Whenever he’s given the opportunity, he leaps at the chance to digress and turn to something completely different, like, for instance, a very touching and human story of an aspiring rock musician.

Of all building materials, concrete usually feels the most unnatural. In the hands of a master it can be transcendent — but those moments are the exceptions, not the rule, and even then they tend to be appreciated mostly by lovers of modernism.

In our daily lives concrete construction often presents itself as a problem, something decaying and in need of repair. (The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the amount of money needed to fix existing US infrastructure is $9.1 trillion; most of that is concrete in one form or another.)

Concrete’s durability comes with a catch

Wilson talks a lot about how concrete construction lasts for only 40 years, a statement that obviously isn’t true (the Pantheon, which he visits in Rome, is nearly 2 000 years old) but that contains a kernel of truth: Concrete is so ubiquitous that the only time most people even notice it is when it’s broken in some way.

A lot of the cheap concrete construction from the 1960s and 1970s has not been well maintained — it looks so impregnable, it can be hard to imagine how fragile and rust-prone it really is – which has led to concrete being associated in the public mind with stains and ugliness and disrepair.

When something like New York’s pro-development City of Yes legislation arrives, the first reaction can often be “there’s too much ugly construction already, I don’t want more, not even if you call it affordable housing.”

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Zool Zulkowitz, a member of Manhattan’s Community Board 5, went so far as to call Adams’ proposal “the final dehumanisation of the New York City streetscape”.

The History of Concrete is not a polemic – quite the opposite. But that’s precisely what makes it so interesting as a window into the often contradictory strands of public opinion on the subject.

Wilson, in a previous show, took on the subject of scaffolding in New York, nearly all of which is ostensibly in place to protect the public from bits of buildings falling onto pedestrians below.

Viewed from that angle, almost all urban buildings are inherently dangerous – and since that construction invariably involves vast quantities of concrete, all of which is going to age in an unpredictable manner, it’s easy to see where undercurrents of mistrust can originate.

Read: Trash to treasure: Indonesian firm turns plastic into bricks

The perennial fight between NIMBYs and YIMBYs is normally framed as a battle of abstract concepts. Terms such as urban density, housing prices, neighbourhood character, carbon footprint, automobile dependency and more get thrown back and forth in debates that can get extremely heated.

Underneath all that, however, is the lived experience of walking down a concrete sidewalk, passing concrete buildings and getting stuck in traffic behind hulking concrete mixer trucks with their instantly recognizable rotating drums.

Wilson’s documentary is a useful reminder that most people would welcome less of all that, even if it’s necessary for us all to have somewhere to live.

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