Materials Matter: Brick
Originally published in Ark Journal

In your hand, a single, standard size brick is surprisingly heavy. Dead weight. A block of red or gray or pale yellow clay, rough to the touch, sometimes brittle, drab even; the most common object in the world. And despite being an ancient and highly versatile architectural material, enduring enough to connect Victorian London with Hadrian’s Villa, the Ishtar Gate, the grand Mosques of Mali, and the Pueblo dwellings of North America (all associated with bricks of one sort or another), bricks are not likely to be found on many people’s lists of innovative technologies. And yet, despite having changed little over millennia of use, good old brick and mortar is an analogue building material that is finding a surprising new level of relevance in the digital age.

Recent high profile projects prove that brick continues to be a muse for the world’s best architects. When designing the interiors for Copenhagen’s new Noma restaurant complex in 2018, designer David Thulstrup, in partnership with Bjarke Ingels’ BIG, took specific inspiration from the comforts of home. “Here in Denmark,” says Thulstrup, “brick has a strong connection to residential design, especially in the modernist houses of the 1950s and 1960s, I drew upon this contextual inspiration and weaved it into the material pallet and the design of the lounge building.” Today, eager guests arriving at what’s known as Noma 2.0 and admiring it’s warm, homey interiors may not even realise why Noma’s lounge feels so welcoming, but it does, and the gentle yellow tones and tactile cadence of the lounge’s handmade, hand laid brick walls have a lot ot do with that feeling.

Back in the 1970s, the American architect Louis Kahn famously told a group of students that, in moments of uncertainty, it was important for designers to ‘ask’ their materials for advice. He used brick to illustrate this concept. "You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'" It’s a classic anecdote, repurposed a million times since Kahn, and the point,is this: all materials have distinctive qualities and natural limitations. There are things that wood, for example, inherently ‘wants’ to do in architecture (span short to medium distances, travel in more or less straight lines, and to be used as flooring and cladding). By contrast, there are things that wood certainly doesn’t ‘want’ to do (curvilinear shapes, hold up skyscrapers, or come in close contact with moisture). The same goes for stone and steel and brick. By saying that a given material ‘wants’ something, Kahn reminds us that, if and when a designer uses materials in such a way that celebrates that material’s innate capabilities, then wood and stone and steel and even brick will not only speak to us, they may, in fact, sing. 

Take, for example, Studio Olafur Eliasson’s recent Fjordenhus project (2018), the facade of which is formed by four intersecting brick clad cylinders, and whose, curving walls, “transform our perception of [the building] as we move through its spaces.” In Eliasson’s words, “rounded negative volumes have been carved from its facades of custom-glazed brick to create an extraordinary architectural statement of complex curved, circular, and elliptical forms, torquing walls and parabolic arches.” Here Eliasson and Fjordenhus’ lead architect Sebastian Behmann are not only giving brick the arch it wants, they are going even further, pushing the material’s structural and sculptural limits with complexity, curves, parabolas, and Gaudi-esque expressions of organic geometry. This is brick that sings. 

Building materials that want something? Brick that sings? What are we talking about here, architectural mysticism? Well, in a way, yes. The big picture stories of all the world’s cultures—both past and present—are recorded and preserved in the largest things we build and the smallest things we craft; from our cities and cathedrals to our jars and our jewelry. And because the raw materials we use to create things inextricably become the things themselves, there is a constant dialogue of creation taking place. For Louis Kahn brick as an architectural material ‘wants’ to tell us that, by becoming an arch, it can not only soar gracefully overhead, it can also bear great structural loads and, therefore, provide a practical service to engineering in an elegant, gravity-defying fashion.

When the Australian firm of Smart Design Studio won the competition to design Sydney’s new Rail Operations Centre (ROC), they decided that brick (particularly arched brick), with its historic associations to strength, was to be a key, statement-making feature of the new transport headquarters. Architect William Smart explains the concept as being, “informed by the language of great railway infrastructure,” and drawing upon, “the familiar iconography of masonry arches that occur in many buildings and bridges.” According to Smart, the red brick facades are also, “redolent of the Australian landscape, its colour, its formidable scale and its legendary toughness.” A maximalist celebration of masonry and its dependability, the ROC features masonry walls up to a metre thick and brick arches that span up to 64 metres—now the largest spans of their kind in Australia.

By Louis Kahn’s standards, Smart’s ROC is a strong example of a designer allowing brick do precisely what brick ‘wants’ to do. In fact, the building is, unsurprisingly, aesthetically reminiscent of Kahn’s use of brick for his own National Assembly (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962 - 1983) and Arts United Center (Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, 1973) projects. What unites Smart’s ROC with Kahn’s work as well as that Eliasson and others who have successfully tapped the unique potential of brick is this: the effective manipulation of the material’s structural properties with its ability to curve, climb, and arch into graceful architectural forms.

Brick connects us with the past in the way more modern, ‘hands off’ building materials cannot. Yes, reinforced concrete can carry heavier loads and better withstand seismic activity. Yes, steel can span further and push structures skyward. But brick, brick does something else for the built environment and for our human-scale experience of it. In fact, as high-definition screens, artificial intelligence, and the internet become increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, brick may be just the material we need more of in homes, offices, and cities. Strong, natural, and laid out in simple rhythmic courses, brickwork is comforting because it is comprehensible. It can, therefore, in its blocky, brittle, sometimes drab way, provide us with a profound form of aesthetic and psychological reassurance. In a world of staggering digital interconnectivity and increasingly rapid change, brick is a simple technology that provides a refreshingly tangible link to the raw materials of our shared planet and a connection to the eternal need of humans to build things that we hope will last for a long time.

Originally published Ark Journal Volume I, Spring / Summer 2019.