If, in fact, humanity has turned into a geological force, then we can no longer speak of history as such. All history is now, by definition, geo-history, including the history of power. By brutalism, I therefore refer to the process by which power as a geomorphic force henceforth constitutes itself, expresses itself, reconfigures itself, acts and reproduces itself through fracturing and fissuring. (Mbembe 2020: Avant propos § 6)

In cooperation with the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021, we designed the project Deep Time Concrete as an artistic investigation into the past and the possible futures of one of the earliest concrete buildings in Vienna — the annex of the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). We took a sample from the 1908 building and, assisted by a team of scholars, analysed it by means of thin sections and historic research. Through the composition of the sediments of the probe, we could identify the river from which the sand and gravel was extracted: the Danube. By analysing the ratio of carbonation of the cement, the quarry from which the limestone was quarried and burned could be located: Mannersdorf, 40 km east of the museum. In a further step, we could also identify the creatures whose deposits formed the rocks that are still present today and still mined for the making of new cement: a colony of red algae that lived approximately 15 million years ago, at the edge of the Paratethys Sea.

While concrete tends to be labelled a natural material, it is more accurately described as a fossil-building material. In this sense, concrete is similar to gasoline, which is rarely advertised as a natural product.

During the GC Conference, Michael Wagreich presented slides showing different organisms whose ancestors potentially form our built surroundings.

However, concrete is a fossil material not merely owing to its biogenic sediments but also because of its interdependence in relation to the whole fossil system. Whether it is the extraction in the quarry, the baking of the stones, the transportation of the smashed mountains, or the industrial labour needed to handle the running rock at the construction site, concrete depends on fossil energies and fossil means of production, while being used to build a fossil infrastructure.

Deep Time Concrete not only accompanied this research into the history of the museum’s construction material but also allowed for speculations on the building’s potential future over the next 15 million years. Jan Zalasiewicz points out that when one imagines the deep-time future of any built structure, it always involves a question of either sedimentation or erosion. Depending on the given plate tectonics, any location on the Earth is either lifted up, which certainly leads to buildings being ground away by erosion over time, or sunk down, which raises the possibility of buildings and their occupants being buried, compacted, and eventually preserved in some form (Zalasiewicz 2009: 84–85). Ultimately, then, Deep Time Concrete comprises analysis of the geological past and speculative future of the museum’s building.

Next to the information poster for the project, two epistemic objects are paired in a vitrine of the museum. ‘Archiving the Redundant Information’ is a 3D print made from paper pulp, clay, and calcium carbonate. It was produced from a 3D scan of a limestone rock from the quarry, with an inkjet print being placed next to the vitrine. This work refers to the shape of a stone that was destined to dissolve during the process of cement production — while also taking into account that its seemingly ‘natural’ shape did not evolve from a natural process but was the result of blasting during the industrial mining process. On the other hand, ‘Geschiebe in Form gehalten’ is made from sand and gravel from the Danube river, moulded after the shape of one of the concrete beams of the museum’s cellar. Accompanied by a short essay, ‘The Speculative Fossilisation of the Museum of Applied Art’, it displays a possible future scenario for the building and its materials.

To promote the allegedly long lifespan of concrete, the industry often makes reference to Roman buildings like the Pantheon, which was built almost 2,000 years ago (with self-healing concrete and without problematic steel reinforcements; Beton Dialog Österreich 2021). Nevertheless, reinforced concrete’s durability is estimated to be around fifty years for bridges and up to 140 years for foundations (INQA Bauen). But the calculations of a building’s lifespan depend less on the durability of the material than on economic strategies. Complex formulas include inflation, depreciation, taxes, prospective returns from tenancy, and so on. A recent big data survey has predicted the lifespans of concrete buildings in South Korea to be only 22.8 years (Andersen & Negendahl 2023). Using data from Denmark, the same study shows ‘a tendency for a declining lifespan based on the considered construction period, in which the lifespans of newer buildings (no more than thirty years old) are 45% shorter than the average lifespan’ (Andersen & Negendahl 2023). Following capitalist principles, the main question is not how long a building could last, but how long it can be used to make a profit for. This approach enables economic strategies — such as planned obsolescence and the demolishing of functioning buildings — for the sole purpose of enabling new constructions and generating more profit. Recently, revisions of taxonomies and legislation by the European Union and individual national states have begun to establish full lifecycle assessments, including CO₂ emissions, in order to reduce demolitions and facilitate a circular economy.

Contemporary research into new concrete recipes has reported a theoretical functional lifespan of thousands of years (Löfken 2009). But instead of being seduced by ideas of everlasting — ‘sustainable’ — buildings, societies should discuss what mechanisms of power are linked to particular construction materials. While the reinvention of concrete has supposedly improved the living conditions of a few generations, it is also responsible for the loss of local building cultures as well as personal disempowerment, by industrialising construction and diminishing the possibilities for home dwellers to take care of their buildings.

Nineteenth-century ferroconcrete, paired with modernism’s unleashing of productive forces, has brought about a situation in which a few people (mainly white and male) have tremendous influence on the living situations of thousands or millions (Jappe 2021; Forty 2013: 18). In post-war Europe, concrete was understood as the best means for rebuilding the housing that was so urgently needed, so modernism’s ideas of ‘living, working, recreation, and circulation’ echoed around construction sites, while local building cultures gradually diminished:

Global betonitis seems to have [...] [wiped] out the infinite variations of architecture developed over millennia. Adapted to the local context, using locally available materials, variable in the details against the background of a unified whole, creative in the use of their thermal properties, often self-constructable, but in other cases resorting to a sophisticated craftsmanship, with symbols charged with meaning and sustainable […] [humankind] has demonstrated its ability to adapt to its environment without destroying it. (Jappe 2021) [10] 

The long and often collective process of building has now turned into an industrial endeavour that requires only a few months for the thoughts of single planners to be transformed into ‘human-made stone’ — a phenomenon that can be described as the petrification of ideas. Ideas that are born within particular social paradigms are turning into solid matter, which most certainly has a different longevity to the paradigms they stem from.

While the combination of steel and concrete is statically convincing, it leaves future occupants with limited space for structural changes, fundamental adaptations, or possibilities of repair. Arguably, it is a benefit for concrete houses to need less care than those made of traditional materials, but they hardly allow home dwellers to interact with their built environment and take care of it. If the steel within the concrete walls starts to corrode, highly advanced industrial techniques are needed to save the functionality of the structure. It might be hard work to replace rotting wooden stances or dangerously leaning stone walls, but it is feasible, without depending on an industry.

Summing up, concrete has changed the housing sector in three ways: by diminishing local building cultures; by reducing individual possibilities for altering living spaces; and by creating a dependence on industrial experts for building and caretaking. Arguably, these changes have led to an erosion of society’s perspectives about what good living can look and feel like. In this sense, the ‘petrification of ideas’ describes not only an approach to construction, but also the inability of individuals to imagine different forms of living.

The paragraphs above mainly discuss the functional lifespans of housing and the apparent necessity of using concrete, while touching less on the topic of infrastructure. Today, it seems harder to relinquish the use of concrete in the transformation from fossil power generation to hydro and wind power, due to their dependence on it. Taking the interdependence of housing and infrastructure into consideration, then, we acknowledge that this project cannot provide sufficient solutions relating to the use of concrete in infrastructure, but we can pose the question as to how much of the produced energy in the Global North is actually necessary for a good life and how much is being used to keep a destructive system running.

Nikolaus Eckhard’s le temps fossile and brea.th.up both deal with the concept of the petrification of ideas.

le temps fossile (2022) was a two-day performance/workshop with architecture students from the École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires, Paris-Est. Designed as a collaborative research project, the group worked with fresh concrete to explore intra-active relationships between the body, matter, and architecture. The participants questioned the modernist understanding of concrete as a malleable material without inherent shape, by confronting it with the shapes and needs of their own physicality. Taken away from the realm of drawn concepts, where human ideas can seemingly endlessly dominate space and form, the weight and pressure of the material became present and, therefore, immanent in the resulting pieces. The collective bodies of the group interacted with fresh concrete, finding new sensibilities towards the material — a different kind of softness, which not only comes through feeling the liquid, malleable state of uncured concrete but also arises through understanding and interacting with the hard reality of it. During the two days, a series of photos as well as three objects were created.

brea.th.up (2022) similarly investigates concrete by approaching it through the body — shaping it and being shaped by it:

In this series of works, the setting of brea.th.up was the most intense I have experienced so far. Clamps blocked my body from moving while my friends Mira and Daniel poured fresh concrete into the space between my arms, legs, torso, and head. A bent copper tube allowed me to breathe. The curing of the concrete took about 40 minutes, in which I felt the slow transition from holding the material to being held by it. My body is part of the 1.1 teratonnes of biomass on the planet. 0.01% of it is made up by humans (Elhacham et al. 2020). The harder the concrete got, the more difficult it got to expand the volume of my chest — to breathe. (Eckhard, unpublished notes 2024)

The work consists of a sculpture, a video, and photo documentation of its making.

The third timescale we are considering has two sides: human intervention and human prevention. The former refers to the timespan of humans intervening with planetary spheres, by extracting, processing, emitting, building, demolishing, re-using, or depositing components of concrete. Human activity towards natural resources and their biogeochemical embedments first went beyond planetary boundaries around 1970, when global resource use exceeded 25 Gigatonnes per year (Hickel 2022: e344). The time of human prevention refers to the remaining timespan humans have to influence the degree of the climate crisis:

Continued technological acceleration presages a fundamental problem for humans because their capacity to deal with events that unfold ever more rapidly is biologically limited. Under a continuously accelerating regime, the timescale for significant technological change will eventually become too short for humans to deal effectively with ensuing consequences, such as the emergence of unexpected and large-scale environmental and social disruptions. (Haff 2014: 142)

What Peter Haff is describing is the urgent necessity for humans to figure out a way of taming the technosphere:

[I]ts technological and human components carpet the Earth. A network of roads, paths, pipes, railways, airline routes and shipping lanes supports long-distance transport of mass and energy, reminiscent of the circulation of atmospheric and ocean currents. In emerging as a global phenomenon, the technosphere has joined the classical spheres to become an autonomous Earth system, operating without direct human control. (Haff 2014: 139)

According to Haff, the technospheric currents involving concrete are: the extraction of the construction minerals; the baking of the limestone and the emitting of CO₂; the addition of fresh water, which starts the process of hydration (a phase of ‘liquid petrification’) and subsequently forms the technospheric elements; and, last but not least, the demolition, re-use, or depositing of obsolete concrete structures.

Humans are now dealing with the problem of organising as a global community in order to significantly alter the technosphere’s trajectory. Can humankind prevent an environmental catastrophe by reducing the amount of natural resources used to the point where ecological limits are no longer overshot?

For Christoph Weber, concrete ‘represents more than a material. [It is a medium.] It offers him an opportunity for subversive interventions in a material process: an exploration of possibilities to explore materials as transformable realities’ (Kroeger 2016). His works that involve breaking up concrete before it has started to properly cure may be read as metaphors for human intervention and prevention. In Untitled (Beton bricht Holz, Holz bricht Beton) [Concrete Breaks Wood, Wood Breaks Concrete], Weber conducts an experiment-like repetition of the same action — namely, pulling two wooden poles apart that have been encased in a concrete cast. For one, he waits for a couple of days until the concrete is cured, subsequently resulting in the breakage of one of the wooden poles. For the other, he pulls them apart at green strength, four hours after casting, at exactly the moment the cement reaction is starting to kick in, when fresh concrete has the consistency of clay, subsequently creating fissures in the concrete cast. The work can be seen as a metaphoric call to action, as a reminder to act before it is too late.