The Brick

Bricks are philosphy

Bricks are ubiquitous and often ignored but actually quite sublime, when you stop to notice them. They are the ground beneath our feet, dug up and compacted and moulded and fired and stacked upon itself, to rise up and provide shelter or service. Bricks can seem uniform and utilitarian, but are in fact a natural material as poetic as timber. Wood grows from the earth; bricks are the earth. A brick is as tied to place as any swanky hardwood species. Once you know what you're looking at, you'll see bricks that are the oak or cedar or mahogany of their domain. You'll appreciate their character and colour and texture, as you would the grain and knots of polished floorboards. People are catching onto this, they're chiselling away the plaster of their interior walls to expose the structural brick behind it. Why hide such rustic charm?

To pick up a brick is to hold potential in your hand. Take one brick. Add another brick. And another brick. Bond together with mortar, add more bricks again. Soon you have a wall. You have a hut, or a house, or a school, or a church, a temple, a workshop, an office, a woolstore, a bridge. Maybe you have a whole tower, with an octagonal tomb on the top, with bricks arranged in such beautiful and intricate patterns that the walls resemble textured fabric.

Often, you'll have an arch. Louis Kahn, the American architect once dubbed the 'brick whisperer', knew this was an inevitability:

Bricks know what they like, and they know what they are. How big is a brick?¹ Ask any human at almost any point in history that question, and you'll get the same answer. A brick is as big as a brick. In modern metrics, a standard brick anywhere in the world isn't a long way off the Australian dimensions of 230mm x 110mm x 76mm. But bricks have always had a rough ratio of 4:2:1, and been sized to fit nicely in the human hand. That's just how big a brick should be.

Bricks are our history

There are paintings on the walls of ancient tombs showing Egyptian slaves working clay for mud bricks that were mixed with straw and dried in the sun. This had been the way since at least 7000BC.² Over time, people learnt that making bricks from clay, mixing them with sand, and then putting them in a very very very hot oven produced even better bricks – bricks that were stronger and more waterproof than their muddy prototypes.

Kiln-fired bricks have ever since been the go-to for those seeking to build for strength and resilience and versatility. The three little pigs eventually outsmarted the wolf by building with bricks. After The Great Fire of London destroyed the city in 1666, it was largely rebuilt with bricks. The city of Copenhagen is built almost entirely of red bricks. Any wonder LEGO is a Danish product?

Perhaps the world's most famous brick – arguably, its most important – can be found at the Jiayuguan Pass on the Great Wall of China. Legend has it that the worker responsible for designing that section of the wall 650 years ago had calculated that it would take exactly 99,999 bricks to build it. His superiors threatened terrible punishment if he was wrong by so much as one brick. When construction finished, one extra brick remained on the ledge – but the worker claimed it had been put there by a supernatural being to stabilise the wall, and warned that if it were to be removed, the whole thing would collapse. That brick remains there to this day (and the wall is still standing).

You say to a brick,
'What do you want, brick?'
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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.'

- Louis Kahn

Bricks are an obsession

To know bricks is to love them. For those who fall deeply, head-over-heels in love with them, there is an International Brick Collectors Association (IBCA) to join. (This organisation grew out of the Wichita Kansas Barbed Wire Collectors Association, but that is a story for another time.) This group's members are gently evangelical about their hobby.

"Most people never look at 'em," says Jim Graves, the IBCA's librarian. "I've knocked on doors and said 'Hey you've got an interesting brick around your flower bed'. They say 'What?' and go out and look at it... You try to stir interest a little bit in people, and occasionally you get someone that says 'oh, that's pretty neat', and they start looking for things and before you know it they're hooked."

Once they're hooked, brick collectors travel hundreds of miles a year going to swap meets. "Everybody drives in with, you know, anywhere from five to a couple hundred bricks, and you put them out on the ground and say, 'have at it!'. And so you go around and look at what everybody else has, and take what you want, and they go around and look and see what you have and take what they want."

How do they know which bricks they want? Most bricks feature an imprint, the stamp of the brickmaker. With this, you can work out where a brick is from and usually, how old it is. So the collectors choose bricks with imprints they don't already have – and they'll tell you, it's not really about the brick. It's about what you can learn through a brick about the history of a town.

Bricks are art

People who work with bricks a lot like to experiment with their form. There is a house in Anglesea, Victoria, called 'Burnt Earth Beach House'. It is made of terracotta bricks so extraordinary that curious passers-by stop and holler questions at the owner. The owner is architect John Wardle, who believes bricks have a "universal appeal".

"I've never experienced a house where everybody stops and wants to talk to you – there's something about it that seems to evoke sociability," John says.

"This is a material that spans the world over, from Africa to Asia, northern hemisphere to south. It can be a very rich and sophisticated, expensive material, but it can also be the most humdrum and ordinary material. It is sort of the 'social equity' of brick."

But people stop also because the bricks used in his house are very special. They were designed in conjunction with Klynton Krause – a third-generation Australian brickmaker – to reflect the "magnificent rusty ochre-coloured clay" of the cliff face on a fault line in adjacent bushland that leads to the nearby beach. They were also made to replicate "the rough-and-raw, hewn by wind and salt water" texture of that cliff.

You see, sometimes bricks are still made the same way they have been for thousands of years: by pressing them into moulds. But more commonly, these days, they are extruded.

"They have a machine," explains Jim Graves, who has catalogued pages upon pages of information about these 'pug mills' for the IBCA. "It's got a whole mass of knives and a spiral pattern that turns, kind of like a meat grinder. The thing cranks around. You feed the clay into it, and a column of clay comes out the end, like squeezing a tube with toothpaste."

Normally, the column of clay then reaches a cutter made of wire, which swings down to cut a few dozen bricks in one go. That wire cutter can leave a distinct circular scraping mark, and it cuts a neat straight edge – which isn't very cliff-like.

So the architect and the brickmaker developed a method where the clay was pushed through the extruder but instead of wire, the cutting edge was actually a person, using their own hands to tear a piece of the clay column away for that 'torn edge' look. It took some trial and error to perfect.

"At first, he [Klynton] was lifting it vertically, which meant the tears were really even across each brick," explains John. "We were saying 'no no no – we want it more uneven'. So we got him to pull it more diagonally to make the tears uneven."

It's such a unique effect, that people don't know what they're looking at.

"Everybody asks 'is it broken?' And I say 'no, it's torn, it's a torn surface'."

Bricks are recyclable

People stop in their tracks at Adam Haddow's house, too. His is in Surry Hills, in Sydney (see p076), and it also uses bricks that were made by Krause Bricks, for a different Wardle project (Phoenix Central Park).

"Krause Bricks are made near where I grew up," Adam says. "I was down for Christmas one year, and I met up with Klynton, and there were all these bricks in his brickyard. And I said, 'there's a lot of bricks, where are they going to?'. He said 'oh, they're not going anywhere. They've just come back because they were rejected³ for colour or dimension or whatever'. You know, because they're handmade, there can be a lot of variety in them. I was like, 'what are you going to do with them?', and he said 'I'm gonna crush them for a road base because there's too many of them. I can't just let them sit here.' I was like 'Oh God, don't do that, let's use them!'."

So Adam (also an architect) designed the entire facade of his home – 19 Waterloo Street – with these bricks in mind. (The bricks were just a bit too warm and yellow in colour to work with the cool tones of Wardle's Phoenix project, but tied in perfectly with the Sydney sandstone near his site.) Some of the repurposed bricks were broken in transit, but even those were then worked into the design, with their rougher edges facing out at the base of the building.

"The nice thing about brick is it's like a piece of velvet fabric. While it's all the same, there's a lot of movement to it, and it'll capture the light differently across it," Adam says. Like velvet, his house invites a tactile response. "There are a lot of architects that come and see it, but it's the general public who just walk past and then they stop and talk about it. That's quite nice to listen to. They love it. They come and touch it."

This is the beauty of bricks. They can always find a new home. Imperfect somewhere is perfect somewhere else. Sometimes, when a building is demolished, the old bricks are cleaned up on site to be put back together in a new form.

Bricks are even being made now from other waste. Scrap materials like glass and ash that would otherwise end up in landfill can replace clay, reducing the necessary firing temperature by up to 20 percent and producing energy-smart bricks. In Jakarta, certain types of plastic waste that can't otherwise be recycled – noodle packets, coffee sachets, plastic bags and straws that usually end up in waterways – are shredded and mixed with cement and sand to make eco-friendly pavers. In Paris, textile waste is upcycled by mixing the colour-sorted fibres of old clothes with plant-based glue, and pressing them into different shaped blocks. Zips, tags and sequins are included, giving each of these recycled bricks a man-made timbre of its own.

Bricks are craft

Stephen Canavan is the bricklayer who laid the bricks for Adam's house. He's been doing it for 20 years, since starting his apprenticeship in Ireland at age 19. What did he think when he first saw Adam's design?

"I was excited, really excited about it. I knew it was going to be a difficult job, and it was. I was there some nights until late in the evening – when we were building it, it rained for like three months, and I was laying bricks in the rain, and I wasn't happy with them the next day and I'd pull them out and do it again."

A bricklayer wants to do something different, he wants to use his skill – not just lay four walls over and over. Stephen loves doing Flemish bond, or English bond, or Hit-and-Miss bond, or custom detailing or inverted arches. Or something totally unexpected – like being asked to use the bricks that broke on the way to Adam's house, to give a different type of texture to part of the building.

"It was just great doing stuff like that," he says. "That's where the stonemasonry comes into it. It's ancient – it's one of the oldest trades there is, when you're doing stonemasonry as well, it lets you be a little more creative."

Laying bricks is meditative, and repetitive, and physically demanding, and deeply satisfying. So much so, that even though Stephen runs his own bricklaying business now, he can't bear too much time in the office – he makes sure he still has plenty of time on the tools.

"I think it's good for you. I'm a lot happier when I'm out on site, listening to music with the lads and having the craic, you know? I'm just at peace when I'm doing it, I just love it. And it's rewarding, when you're building something, and you can stand back and have a look at it at the end of the day."

He's eating the elephant, but savouring every bite.

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¹ The size of bricks. Standard brick sizes around the world vary slightly, but all would be approved by Goldilocks as “just right”: not too heavy, not too big, and able to be picked up in one hand. Bricks in colder climates—like Russia and China—tend to be slightly thicker (up to 150 mm) as this improves their thermal mass (the ability to hold heat). Places using the imperial system—the UK and the US—tend to have slightly smaller bricks. The only time bricks have swelled beyond these ideal dimensions was in the 1700s, when King George III introduced a “brick tax” of 2 shillings and 6 pence per thousand bricks, to help pay for his wars in the American colonies. Brick manufacturers gave him the middle finger by making their bricks bigger; the government responded by placing a limit on brick size of 10 inches × 5 inches × 3 inches (254 mm × 127 mm × 76 mm), and by 1850 gave up on the tax altogether, meaning bricks could deflate back down to the size they ought to be.

² Bricks meet fire. The first known example of fired bricks dates back to somewhere around 4400 BC. Some from this time have been excavated in China, while other historical records suggest the Mesopotamians discovered the method slightly earlier. Many places around the world later independently developed the technique, while the Romans made it widespread thanks to mobile kilns that were dragged across their Empire.

³ Bricks rejected. There can be a lot of natural variation in any batch of bricks. Sometimes, this aesthetic inconsistency suits a project; other times, it does not. Many big projects end up with a pile of outliers and excess stock which can either be repurposed at other jobs, or recycled—crushed into “brick chips” and used as an earthy landscaping material, or more finely ground up for fill sand, track, and drainage material. Sometimes, the brick dust comes full circle and is turned back into bricks again.