‘Natürlich Beton’ — ‘naturally concrete’ — has been the slogan of the collective marketing strategy of the Austrian cement-producing industries from 2020 onwards. The wordplay not only claims concrete as the most natural, and hence reasonable, choice of material, but it also evokes a seemingly inherent sustainability, by highlighting its ‘natural’ ingredients. Our project, Greenwashed Concrete, took its name from the initial finding of apparently conflicting definitions regarding the sustainability of concrete and set out to widen our understanding of concrete’s role in the Capitalocene. The research methodology is based on merging heterogeneous scholarly expertise with sculptural practices (with, on, and against concrete), in collaborative, interdisciplinary research settings.

This exposition follows the project’s artistic research in two major areas where contradictions between environmental science and the building industry occur: MASS and TIME.

From 1900 to 2020, the globally accumulated mass of concrete amounted to 550 gigatonnes (Krausmann et al. 2018), which is around half of the Earth’s living biomass (Elhacham et al. 2020), and which, according to an illuminating article in The Guardian’s ‘Concrete Week’, makes it the most destructive material on Earth (Watts 2019). On the other hand, the building industry claims that even more concrete is necessary to build a sustainable future.

Until recently, the construction sector had mostly concentrated on the economic life cycles of buildings and infrastructures (approximately fifty years; Floegl 2010; Jappe 2021). Lifespans of buildings have been found to range from ten to eighty years (Andersen & Negendahl 2023). This does not correlate with the industry’s advertisement of long service life (Beton Dialog Österreich 2020), nor does it relate to concrete being considered a signal of the Anthropocene (Waters and Zalasiewicz 2018).

We think that different perspectives relating to concrete’s temporality should be applied in order to understand the radical measures that will be needed to tackle the multiple environmental problems that the use of this material instantiates — and also to successfully reach the targeted net zero CO₂ emissions by 2050. Thus, the total lifecycle must be considered: from the chemical reactions of the material’s making to the useful lives of concrete structures, while also considering the inherent geological dimensions. This project proposes a post-humanist perspective on concrete and its temporality to enhance our understanding of the materials involved and their role within the discourse around sustainability.

The installation for the Vienna Biennale for Change 21 at the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (MAK), individual exhibitions and performances, findings from the Greenwashed Concrete Conference (GC Conference), and the final dissemination at Posthuman Rocks, at the École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires, Paris-Est, are displayed in the two main chapters of this exposition — ‘Grey Matter’ (MASS) and ‘Concrete Times’ (TIME). Furthermore, the exposition includes a selection of slides that were presented at the GC Conference by members of the project’s supporting research team.

Concrete has often been viewed through the narrow perspectives of technical engineers, who have underestimated the socio-ecological complexity of this material, normalised it as the ‘natural’ choice for building almost everything, and dominated the accompanying scientific discourse. The key researchers found it surprisingly easy to invite experts from architecture, ecology, economics, geology, philosophy, and sociology who were concerned with the topic in their respective spheres and who stated that a project connecting them was long overdue. The design of the project allowed intellectual as well as physical engagements with the material, making art a key element of interlinking the various positions. The field of artistic research allowed artistic methods of understanding to be merged with scholarly methods of questioning, as well as applied knowledge from builders and real estate developers, thereby broadening the scientific discourse surrounding the material.

Art was initially a connecting factor and a means of improving the scientific discourse, but over the course of this project it became a benefactor itself. The recursive quality of the artistic research setting enabled scientific facts to be rooted in the evolutions of single art works.

The general design of this artistic research project benefited from art’s possibilities of radically shaking belief systems — which, in this case, seem to be fossilised in society’s addiction to the use of concrete — and managed to contradict the claims regarding concrete’s positive qualities put forward by proponents of narrow perspectives. For example, the claim that erecting high-rises ‘preserves our trees, meadows and fields’ (see the advertisement) employs a narrow perspective, seemingly limited to a simplified choice between sealing a given area of land with single-family houses, and thus destroying the meadows, fields, and trees, or putting a high-rise in the middle of that land and preserving the meadows around it.

Employing a wider perspective, however, this project enabled the view that meadows, fields, and trees are impacted not only by a given construction site but also by an assemblage of negative ecological impacts linked to the concrete industry, which keeps promoting and therefore perpetuating an understanding of architecture that can never be truly sustainable. The question is not how to seal less soil, but rather how to seal no soil at all.

The photo series shown in this introduction offers a way of affirmatively subverting the industry’s strategies of greenwashing concrete, by recontextualising original advertisements. As the CO₂ emissions of the cement industry (around 7% of overall global CO₂ emissions; Lehne & Preston 2018; Fennell et al. 2022) are undeniable, the hectic research activities being conducted in cement laboratories around the world — with a view to reaching the promised net zero cement production by 2050 — appear to be contributing to the desired image of concrete as a green growth material. The road map for the Austrian cement industry proposes a 44% reduction via Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) technology, which has not yet been fully developed (VÖZ 2022). Additionally, other negative impacts — like the sealing of soils, freshwater and sand consumption (Miller et al. 2018), toxic dust, overheated cities, the creation of massive horizontal and vertical barriers, and the overall negative impacts on biodiversity — are mostly disregarded.

We would like to commend the scientists for reducing some of the problems accompanying concrete — for example, by decreasing CO₂ emissions per tonne of cement, by proposing more efficient means of construction, and by developing recarbonisation and CCUS technologies. Nevertheless, the projected growth in global concrete consumption to 2050 will hamper any efforts to convert concrete into a truly sustainable material.

As our project was triggered by the Austrian context, we have often used data from this national perspective, which is similar to that of other Central and Western European countries. That said, it is of the utmost importance to view concrete as a global phenomenon, to think critically about decolonial perspectives, and to stop blaming China and the Global South, while the ‘Western’ emissions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still hang heavily in the atmosphere.

Challenges Regarding Sustainability and Artistic Practices with Concrete

As artistic researchers working with concrete, we faced the challenge of how to avoid being bound up with the problems that concrete causes, by producing even more of this destructive material and possibly even assisting industrial interests focused on short-term economic gains. Therefore, this project strived to develop artistic research practices that critically (self-)reflected on the use of concrete. During the course of the project, virgin concrete was poured only when strictly necessary; we took great care with waste separation and re-used concrete where possible.

GREENWASHED CONCRETE

INDEX

RESEARCH PROJECT LEADS

Christoph Weber and Nikolaus Eckhard

Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.

SUPPORTING RESEARCH TEAM

Social Metabolism and Sustainability: Prof. Fridolin Krausmann, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

Anthropocene: Prof. em. Jan Zalasiewicz, University of Leicester, United Kingdom; former head of the Anthropocene Working Group; and Prof. Michael Wagreich, Institute of Geology, University of Vienna, Austria; member of the Anthropocene Working Group.

Art History: Prof. Anna Rosellini, Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, Italy, and History of Architecture, École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires, Paris-Est, France; expert on art using concrete.

Philosophy and Politics of Materiality: Dr Susanne Witzgall, head of cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany.

History of Economics and Degrowth: Dr Matthias Schmelzer, Institute of Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany.

Material Science: Prof. Johannes Weber, Institute for Conservation, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.

Building Construction: Mag.arch Lukas Allner, Institute for Building Construction, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.