Nobody who is remotely familiar with John Wilson’s funny, angsty HBO series How To with John Wilson will be surprised to discover that his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, is not really about concrete. From its opening moments, the film swerves wildly away from its titular subject, dragging audiences into the eccentric, hyper-specific corners of modern life that Wilson has made his signature.
Throughout the documentary, Wilson introduces viewers to an eclectic array of characters. At one point, he introduces us to a man who meticulously removes tattoos from corpses and mounts the dead inked skin as mementos for grieving loved ones. In another scene, he interviews a New York City park official who details, with bureaucratic precision, how to purge poops from public swimming pools.
Yet, whenever the film occasionally drifts back to the subject of concrete, Wilson quickly pivots to something else entirely. He will actively do anything not to dwell on his nominal topic for very long. He never truly wrestles with concrete’s immense physical mass, its staggering omnipresence, or its profound, everyday effects on the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. The topic simply appears too big for comfort, too demanding of his very modern, quick, jump-cutting attention deficits.
If the underlying point of the film is that concrete defies sustained human attention, it is a remarkably good one.
Advertently or not, by the time the film reaches its conclusion, Wilson reveals two of the most astonishing, yet overlooked, facts about the world’s most-used manufactured material: Concrete is largely unseen in our daily lives, and its persistent invisibility endangers us all. This danger does not stem from concrete itself being somehow villainous or malicious, but rather because our lazy, distracted, and often nonexistent engagement with it continually invites disaster.
The Everywhere Material
The numbers behind our reliance on the material are staggering. The world currently produces roughly 30 billion tons of concrete a year. Yet, the very same substance we rely on for structural protection and modern infrastructure is also a major contributor to the escalating global climate crisis.
Cement, the chemical binder that serves as one of concrete’s most vital and foundational ingredients, is directly tied to roughly 8% of all global climate-warming carbon emissions. At the same time, however, concrete remains entirely essential for building seawalls, levees, and other massive urban and coastal structures that humanity will desperately need to forestall the worst damages wrought by climate change.
To put its sheer volume into perspective, the yearly production of concrete tops all other global building materials combined. Most of this staggering amount of new concrete is not being poured in the United States or Europe, but rather in China, India, and other rapidly developing countries on the make.
Throughout the production of the documentary, Wilson frequently interviews various subjects who actually know their concrete facts. Just as these experts seem on the verge of offering a piece of truly gobsmacking concrete information, the film abruptly cuts to something else entirely. For instance, Wilson’s camera might suddenly pan to the painted image of a bubble-butted woman’s rear that he happens to spy on the back of a passing truck. Civilization itself may not hang in the balance over a passing truck decal, but it just might fall due to our collective, profound distraction.
Overlooking the Fourth-Largest Sector of the Economy
In reporting on the broader concrete industry, journalists and researchers repeatedly meet people within the field who simply cannot fathom why the general public cares so little about a substance that literally holds modern civilization together.
In the United States, the construction industry—virtually all of which happens using concrete—stands as the fourth-largest sector in the entire national economy. Yet, the prevailing public reaction remains a collective shrug: So what? It is still perceived as fundamentally boring, right? The cool kids certainly do not hover around concrete engineers at cocktail parties, anxiously waiting to hear about the latest structural advances that make 167-story buildings possible, or how newly developed concrete mixes could potentially absorb carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere rather than emitting it during production.
This cultural disconnect is precisely what academics have spent time analyzing. “Concrete is (almost) everywhere,” writes Julie Soleil Archambault, an anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal. “It often passes unnoticed—too ubiquitous, too mundane, to warrant much attention. Sometimes, however, it does quite the opposite, especially when it fails to meet the expectations of durability invested in it, when it cracks and crumbles.”
