BRICK: One Solid Subject

Today, a nice solid subject:  Brick. A professor of mine called it the Sara Lee of building materials.  “Nobody doesn’t like it,” he said.

Frank Lloyd Wright preferred the long, low proportions
of Roman brick, as famously found in his Robie House
in Chicago (1909).

Brick goes back a long, long way. One reason for brick’s popularity is its timelessness.  It was used as early as 3000 BC in settlements of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, although back then it was simply baked in the sun rather than fired in a kiln.

Later, the Romans kept their brickworks running overtime to supply materials for their burgeoning empire. They preferred an unusually long, flat brick which, two thousand years later,  Frank Lloyd Wright decided was the cat’s meow for his Prairie houses. We still refer to that shape as Roman brick.

Victorian era polychrome brickwork in England.
(Courtesy @tuckpointer)

In the sixth century AD, those fun-lovin’ Byzantines got really creative, using brick laid in decorative patterns to form their charismatic architecture. And during the late nineteenth century, the Victorians used both elaborate patterning and color in their brickwork. They were the undisputed Brickmeisters.

Brick is still available in a huge range of colors, and quite a few shapes as well. It’s also more durable than ever—properly fired, brick will actually outlast many kinds of stone, because its surface is harder and less porous.

That’s all dandy.  But in many parts of the country—like mine—there's that nasty earthquake thing, right? Not necessarily. Brick is too fine a material to be ruled out by seismic worries alone. In residential design, the trick is to avoid using it for structural walls, which require costly reinforcement, and to use it as a nonstructural veneer instead.

Veneer brick: some looks real, some not so real. This project
looks pretty promising.

There are two ways to go here. A veneer wall of full-sized brick can be secured to the structural wall behind it using ties. Or, special thin-brick veneer units can be adhered over structural wood framing. The latter is simpler, cheaper, and much lighter. Most of the big brick manufacturers make thin-brick veneer units in the same range of colors they make full-sized brick. A number of companies that make artificial stone veneers also produce thin-brick products of varying authenticity.

Four basic kinds of brick bond.

Brick’s greatest design property is its modularity.  It’s a small unit, so it can be used to produce arches, curved walls, and all kinds of unusual shapes. And because it’s produced in so many colors and types, it has limitless potential for creating decorative patterns. Speaking of which, here’s some bricklaying terminology you can bore your friends with:

Flemish bond utilizing two colors of
brick (John W. Bush House,
Buffalo, New York.
Architects: Lansing & Beierl, 1903)

In a brick wall, each layer of brick is called a “course”. A brick laid with its long side exposed is called a “stretcher.  When the short side is exposed, it’s called a “header”.  The arrangement of headers and stretchers is called “bond”.  There are a number of traditional bonds, to wit:
     
A wall of stretchers staggered in the normal fashion is called “running bond”.  When there’s a row of headers in every sixth course, it’s called “common bond”. Alternating courses of headers and stretchers are called “English bond”.  Staggered courses of alternating headers and stretchers are called Flemish bond, and when used in combination with two or more colors, can produce various lovely patterns.

The strangest of all bonds is called “stack bond”, and predictably, it’s a Moderrnist invention: it has all the bricks stacked one above the other rather than staggered, so the wall has an ultra-rational gridded look, but much less strength than running bond. Even in 3000 BC, bricklayers knew better than that.