Shed no tears for the lowly brick, apparently consigned to the trash heap of history with stone, engineered wood, and even cement emerging as a trendy, modern building material. Sure, brick is a revered material – entire civilizations have been built out of it – but that was then and this is now.
No worries, creativity has come to the rescue. Digital design, industrial casting and forward thinking now allows builders and architects to experiment with this time-honoured material.
Take Canvas House, a single-family residence in Toronto, Canada for instance. Imaginative brickwork has transformed this simple box into an interesting eye-popping attraction. Boy, does the brickwork ever stand out!
In reality the undulating façade is an optical illusion created by the clever positioning of five-brick modules which in turn are comprised of bricks in three different sizes. In the old days, bricklayers would stack the same sized bricks on top of one another and flush with its neighbour. Not at Canvas House. The result is a pleasing simulated dance of movement which is repeated inside the house with curved walls and rounded corners. Psychologists have determined rooms with curves are more calming than angular designs. The same can be said for exteriors.
The Grand Mulberry, a 20-unit condominium complex in New York City also uses a theatrical sleight-of-hand to draw attention to itself. The heavily textured façade is created by the judicious use of special custom-made bricks with buttons or bumps on them. Think of extra-large Lego blocks. Readily applied at the corners, the bumpy bricks are carefully placed across the façade to create a deliberate pattern elsewhere. The builders wanted to recreate that old-timey Italianate aesthetic and the red-orange terra cotta reinforces that look, a big deal in this predominately Italian neighbourhood.
Comprised of two semi circles that meet and fold into each other in the middle this structure in rural China, officially labelled the Twisted Brick Shell Concept Library, is an art work in itself. It began as steel armature which was then covered with bricks of various sizes both inside and out and held in place with high strength concrete. Unlike Canvas House and The Grand Mulberry, the bricks for Library were cast on site to dimensions as needed, 12 different sizes in fact. Mortar, in this case concrete, oozing out between the bricks give it a rough-hewn rustic look, in keeping with the countryside location.
The shell is more of a place for reflection than a traditional library though. Twenty-four acrylic portholes installed at eye level around the structure’s circumference contain Chinese characters interpreted as art works, not books, by Japanese artist Yoichiro Otani. The intent is to make the viewer aware of their bucolic surroundings by having them stand in the grass and view the artworks through the plastic viewing ports. Who says brickwork has to be utilitarian? Long live the lowly brick. Long may it continue to inspire.
