It is the second-most consumed material on Earth, trailing only water. It is an environmental disaster of monumental proportions, and increasingly, it is falling apart all around us. Meet concrete, the subject of a new feature-length documentary by filmmaker John Wilson, a creator renowned for his distinct knack for finding laugh-out-loud absurdity in the mundane and the overlooked corners of daily life.
The History of Concrete stitches together quick cuts of handheld footage, observational street encounters, and deadpan narration in the signature style of How To with John Wilson, the acclaimed HBO series that launched the filmmaker’s career. Much like his prior episodes focusing on seemingly niche topics such as "how to make small talk" or "how to put up scaffolding," the titular subject of the film is not really the primary point. Instead, Wilson uses the sprawling theme of concrete as a kind of structural connective tissue, taking the viewer on an eccentric and far-flung exploration of the hidden machinery of our world.
Because concrete is so ubiquitous, its presence allows the film to venture into wildly disparate environments. The documentary takes viewers inside a family-run mortuary that specializes in the intricate preservation of tattoos, captures a patriotic brick-laying competition in Las Vegas, and lingers over a grueling 3,100-mile spiritual race in which dedicated runners circle a single block in Queens, New York, for weeks on end.
While it would be a stretch to categorize the documentary as a traditional climate film—indeed, it is explicitly styled with the deceptive warmth of a Hallmark movie—Wilson manages to shed light on an unfolding environmental disaster with every turn of his camera lens. He points out early on that concrete production is the third-biggest contributor to global warming worldwide. And although concrete remains an indispensable pillar of modern civilization, its surprisingly short, crumbling lifespan transforms it into a ticking hazard on an increasingly disaster-prone planet.
Wilson’s personal fascination with the material began when the basement of his apartment building in Queens began intermittently flooding. He attempted to patch the structural repair himself using a standard store-bought concrete mix, but the leak stubbornly kept returning. His frustration is far from isolated. As climate change intensifies storms, increases precipitation, and raises sea levels globally, urban residents—particularly in densely paved metropolises like New York—are dealing with more extreme rainfall and coastal flooding than ever before. The sheer abundance of concrete actively worsens these flooding events by preventing stormwater from naturally seeping into the soil. Worse still, when the aging material inevitably cracks, it fails to block rushing water from filling subway systems and municipal buildings for dozens of days each year.
As the film progresses, Wilson discovers that our concrete-smothered world is fraught with hazards, largely owing to the material’s surprisingly brief functional lifespan. Infrastructure like the Brooklyn Promenade, which forms the uppermost deck of a complex four-layered expressway, was never engineered to last for more than 40 years, according to Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner interviewed in the film. Today, that 1,800-foot-long transportation artery is heavily dependent on patchwork repairs. Schwartz tells Wilson that a major structural catastrophe could be just a few years away if comprehensive overhauls are ignored.
Armed with these stark realizations, any modern city begins to look like a morass of potential infrastructure disasters. It is little wonder that Wilson spent at least a full year filming the widening cracks and decaying surfaces scattered across New York. Some locations, such as a public swimming pool sanitation facility constantly inundated with untreated leaks, are given a few minutes of patient screentime. Others, including the architecturally celebrated Spring Street Salt Shed—now patched awkwardly with packing tape—and a ten-year-old skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that may already face premature demolition, are presented in a quick, jaw-dropping montage. As Wilson observes, it begins to feel as though everyone is somehow in danger.
Perversely, climate change is accelerating this deterioration. Scientific studies show that extreme weather and fluctuating temperatures hasten the chemical and physical breakdown of concrete structures worldwide. Furthermore, even structurally sound concrete poses distinct hazards as the planet warms. The material is a primary driver of the "urban heat island" effect, which can cause local air temperatures to rise by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This turns pavement into a scalding 140-degree griddle during summer heatwaves, contributing to the heat-related deaths of hundreds of people annually in places like Arizona.
Yet, as a local contractor bluntly tells Wilson, society would be entirely lost without it. "We’d be up a creek without concrete," the contractor notes, emphasizing that it is used for virtually everything. Cities like New York require vast, continuous quantities of the material to construct new housing, expand transit lines, and maintain existing urban areas.
Unfortunately, sand—the fundamental ingredient required to make concrete—is rapidly vanishing. Coastlines are eroding, and human civilization consumes some 50 billion tons of sand every year. While the general public remains largely unaware of the impending crisis, ecological experts have repeatedly attempted to warn of a looming global sand shortage driven by relentless land reclamation and urban extraction.
Near the conclusion of the film, Wilson visits a concrete recycling plant, representing one of the few existing mitigation efforts aimed at these systemic problems. These specialized facilities are designed to divert demolition debris from overflowing landfills and, ideally, produce newly usable aggregate material with a lower carbon footprint. However, the facility Wilson documents near Brooklyn’s marine terminal was simultaneously blanketing nearby residential neighborhoods in dangerous amounts of airborne dust. The severe pollution sparked community protests and ultimately led to the plant’s closure.
For now, modern society’s deep dependency on concrete seems just as intractable as its numerous environmental pitfalls. "Once you’re used to something, it becomes hard to change your lifestyle without external pressure," Wilson reflects.
For many observers, the realization hits close to home. Moving to a dense metropolis like New York City often comes with the comforting notion that urban lifestyles maintain a significantly smaller carbon footprint than sprawling suburban ones. However, standard sustainability metrics typically account only for the energy and materials residents consume directly, frequently omitting the vast embodied emissions locked inside the buildings, subterranean sewers, and massive concrete foundations that make city life physically possible in the first place.
Walking out of the Manhattan theater where The History of Concrete premiered, the surrounding gray landscape comes into sharper, more unsettling focus, as if the film’s observational lens had never truly been switched off. There is a distinct poetry in Wilson’s work: the banal becomes deeply fascinating, the bizarre becomes delightful, and systemic heartbreaks are viewed through a lens of unguarded humor. His persistent curiosity, bordering at times on voyeurism, serves as an open invitation to join him in the simple, radical act of paying attention to the world we have built.
Outside the theater, those details emerge instantly: a toddler lying on her stomach outside the gum-plastered entrance of a subway station; a dumpling food truck seemingly trapped in a deep pavement pothole; groups of formal evening-wear-clad pedestrians rushing past as their long skirts drag through street puddles. All of it forms an inescapable part of a concrete world that, for better or worse, is entirely worth noticing.