Can John Wilson Convince You to Care About Concrete?

Filmmaker John Wilson and I are seated in a kitchen on the 35th floor of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in New York. Like most of Manhattan, this tower worships at the altar of concrete, which makes up its core, foundation, and floor slabs. In this structure alone, there’s enough of it to pave more than 4,000 New York City blocks.Concrete—the second-most-used material on earth, just behind water—is also what brought Wilson from his home in Ridgewood, Queens to Lower Manhattan to talk to me today. On September 18, his first feature-length film, The History of Concrete, will be released in theaters (including Low Cinema, the 40-seat venue he recently rehabilitated with a partner.)Wilson is still figuring out how to describe The History of Concrete—he calls it “a million things at once.” Running an hour and 40 minutes, it’s ostensibly what its title suggests: a documentary about concrete, the substance that makes up most of the world’s towers, sidewalks, streets, and houses. But as in his Emmy-nominated HBO series How to With John Wilson, that investigation is merely an entry point to a more complex story of how the built world goes up and what takes it down. It’s also a meditation on impermanence, and a portrait of the pains and triumphs of making art in capitalism. Above all, Wilson brings us a plea to think more deliberately about the urban environment—to imagine the possibility of a thousand-year city, rather than settling for the “50-year” version he believes we’re living in now.As viewers, our journey through all of this starts in Wilson’s own home in Ridgewood, where a cracked foundation brings stormwater gurgling up from the depths. The concrete that has kept his house from sinking into the earth until now is in disrepair; Wilson attempts to patch it himself, leaving behind a craggy keloid on the patio. “Most people just hire a contractor,” he tells me, “but I got a bunch of books and wanted to understand concrete on a more molecular level, to figure out what my house is even made of, and whether or not repairing it now is going to save me a headache in the future.” He embarks on a global journey to trace some of the earliest examples of concrete, still standing in Italy nearly 2,000 years after the decline of the Roman empire. If this stuff has managed to stick around, why then is Wilson’s own home falling apart? Better yet: Why does everything else seem to be falling apart, too?Wilson continues the auteur style of filmmaking he’s honed over the past decade and a half, including the three seasons of his HBO series. He and his team document life on the streets of New York—and occasionally elsewhere, with ludicrously mundane Las Vegas trade shows being a favorite setting—capturing the kinds of outrageous and ordinary moments that people might briefly register in passing, but never stop to engage with. His camera lets us linger. Stitched together, these scenes form a meandering narrative that responds to Wilson’s own proclaimed curiosities, but also apertures onto thornier and more existential topics. Wilson is our Virgil, guiding us physically and emotionally via disembodied voiceover.In The History of Concrete, he spends much of the film observing the city’s failing infrastructure: its public pools, gum-spackled sidewalks, and the triple-cantilever of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a crumbling but crucial thoroughfare serving around 130,000 vehicles per day. Sam Schwartz, the city’s former traffic commissioner—and about as close to an A-list celebrity as the world of transportation engineering has to offer (he famously coined the term “gridlock”)—stands beneath it, pointing to a patch of exposed rebar. Without intervention, Schwartz tells us that catastrophic failure might just be a matter of time. (Since the final cut of the movie was made, the city announced a $4-billion, 10-year rehabilitation plan for this section of the expressway, which promises to extend its lifespan another 40 years.)Wilson also traces notable instances of building fiascos around New York, like awning collapses and the troubled history of 432 Park, the supertall on Billionaire’s Row. The latter reminds us that even the city’s wealthiest residents are imperiled by the same material failures as the rest of us: Though some of the units in the 11-year-old structure are currently on the market for over $80 million, the building’s concrete is riddled with cracks and its façade is even dropping chunks of material.Beyond what gets built badly, Wilson is just as concerned about what never gets built at all. He calls The History of Concrete “one of the most NIMBY movies I’ve ever seen,” and indeed, his camera takes audiences directly into the fractious milieu of civic hearings and protests. (NIMBY is a term for a resident who resists real estate or infrastructural projects that fall in their neighborhood—hence the acronym, which stands for “not in my back yard.”) Affordable housing and a skate park both fall into the crosshairs of the NIMBYs in Wilson’s world, which of course is our own. Everyone appears to agree that these things are good ideas; precious few seem willing to cede what’s theirs to make them happen.While audiences will find plenty of humor in this film, its subject matter is serious—as is Wilson. He gestures to 432 Park and the partial collapse of the Pfizer World Headquarters this summer—a site that was a part of New York’s ambitious office-to-residential conversion plans. “These all seem like isolated incidents, but they are going to continue happening,” he says.Wilson is not an architect, and he self-effacingly refers to himself as a “Mr. Bean” type. His storytelling wanders us through the city, from one seemingly unplanned pocket of interest to another—what a media or urban critic (and Wilson is both) might call a dérive. His language is accessible, and the design and engineering failures he documents are recognizable to anyone who’s spent time walking through New York City. One gets the sense that maybe this humble presentation is all on purpose; that maybe there’s a pill in the peanut butter—that this argument is being made by a filmmaker who spent a decade reading up on urban theory. Because it was.Wilson cites Jane Jacobs, the 20th-century critic and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities as having “lit a fire” for him back in 2008. “It’s influenced a lot of what I do,” he says. He also points to James Howard Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere and William H. Whyte’s 1980 book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces as formative texts. Like Wilson, Whyte observed life on the street like a National Geographic photographer does birds—watching as humans adapt to environmental conditions like benches, water, and sunlight. “[Whyte’s work] proves a point that wasn’t really proven up until then—that there are certain needs we have as people, and as social creatures. Being able to identify the ways that the city tries to suppress that is important,” Wilson says.He sees the topics explored in the film—crumbling infrastructure, historic preservation, NIMBYism, the affordable housing crisis—as urgent. “When I made this, I was thinking about it constantly, and it affected me emotionally,” he says. “I was living with the full dosage of a lot of really depressing trivia about concrete.” Whether the cycle of building, decay, failure, and rebuilding—our collective architectural samsara—is a natural state or a more insidious condition of our economy, Wilson lets us decide. But there’s a telling moment early in the film: Teasing out a bit of metanarrative, the director approaches the actor Michael Imperioli as he’s struggling to get financing for his documentary. What would Imperioli recommend to aspiring young filmmakers hoping to make a movie? The actor barely hesitates: “To make it as inexpensively as they can, and to get it done.” As Wilson shows us, so too have gone the places made for living.