A Brick Is... (Part 1)

Bricks
Originally uploaded by Esparta.

Last week I was invited to our neighbour's house to participate in a "soiree de conversation anglais". Each member of the group prepares a short recitation in English on a set subject. The contributions are generally humorous and eccentric explorations of an alien language. This week the subject was 'Hot and Cold'. We learnt that a 'hot seat' in America is an electric chair and pondered the origin of 'cold turkey', wondering if perhaps the phrase 'cold chicken' might be used to describe the enforced deprivation of minor drugs such as caffeine. After a dose of language, the evening moved on to a pot-luck supper - which turned out to be very pot-luck: black pudding, onion quiche and seven different desserts...

Our neighbours, both members of the group, have lived in their house for more than thirty years. The husband is an architect who designed the house in the 1970s. It is semi-detached, originally built as an experiment in communal living with his neighbour (not us, the other one). The interior design is open plan with upper and lower level connected to form a large open space in the living area. Our neighbours love to travel and have many souveniers of visits to Africa. The book case is also quite fascinating and I sometimes glance surreptitiously at it when I visit.

On this latest occasion, I noticed a copy of Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Cours de linguistique générale', a large, daunting-looking book with a bright orange cover. I asked if I could have a look at it and immediately noticed that it had been read and analysed in some detail with pencil jottings in the margin. When I asked about this, our friend explained that it had been one of the basic texts that had informed his architectural thesis, an analysis of the signification of bricks.

I have borrowed this thesis, written in 1978, and have it in front of me now. The introduction outlines the scope of the study: "We have tried a different approach to the problem (of the signification of architecture). If architecture - a social product - can be a bearer of signs, it is not architecture itself which should be interpreted, but the conditions which produce it... but the subject is too vast, and we must find a narrower point of focus. The brick is the first achieved element in the history of architecture of which a trace can be found..."

The thesis charts the use of brick from the moment 9000 years ago when, with the cultivation of wheat, mediterranean peoples began a sedentary lifestyle and began to invest their energy in the building of permanent homes using brick. They discuss the first brick to have been discovered from archaeological investigations, which comes from Jericho and was made around the 8th millenium. The clay in this area, a powdery aeolian silt containing a strong proportion of lime creates a maleable mixture which is extremely strong when it dries. For the authors, the finger prints made along the top of these bricks, evokes a loaf of bread.

They trace the importance of brick in the building of the earliest great civilisations of Sumeria and Mesopotamia. The god of brick was called Kulla, created from a pinch of clay drawn from the Apson, the "primordial river". "The brick is the symbol of the man fixed in his home, with security and divine protection; but also of limit: of rules, of measure. The closed society as opposed to the open society of the nomad." The development of the oven-baked brick facilitated, according to the authors, a social stratification of society with these better quality bricks being used for palaces and official buildings. Eventually, among the Babylonians, the oven-baked bricks of palaces began to be marked with the seal of the god-king.

The Romans were responsible for propagating brick-making technology throughout their empire, and hence into all parts of Europe. Through the next centuries, however, it was generally the regions that lacked building stone which turned to brick as a building material. This meant that certain regions of Europe became strongly identified with brick built buildings, others not. In Tudor Britain, however, the use of brick became fashioanble since it was associated with the cnstruction of royal palaces, even to the extent that, in regions where stone was common, brick remained the preferred building material among the nobility. In regions where stone was not present, itinerant brick-makers would construct houses from bricks made of clay extracted from a pit that eventually became the house's own cellar.

By 1820, in a world of economic liberalism and inexistant work laws, whole families would manufacture tonnes of brick during 16 hour work days. The quality of the bricks was better when worked by hand, moulding the clay with sand scattered on the work bench in the same manner that a baker would kneed bread on a bench scattered with flour, to stop the dough from sticking. From around this date, the hand-process was replaced little-by-little by machines which accelerated the brick-making process, while replicating the traditional mixing and moulding manipulations of the hand process.

Industrialisation, and the seach for materials which would allow the bricks to bake more quickly - thereby saving energy costs, degraded the quality of bricks and gave them the reputation of a cheap material. In Britain, the 'Fletton Brick' quarried from the Lower Oxford Clay near Peterborough, was found to use 65% less energy to bake than other bricks and gave rise to the London Brick Company, a business so successful that its economical product was able to fight off all competition and hence provide a distinctive face to much British architecture.

Industrialisation also led to innovation in brick production, notably in the creation of perforated bricks of different size and shape with a variety of surface textures. This in turn led to a technicialisation of what had always been a relatively simple process: the building of a wall. Now different kinds of brick were required to provide strength, ventilation, insulation etc.

In opposition to this specialism, at the close of the 20th Century, brick-makers were also returning to traditional methods of brick-creation. Such bricks were expensive and were used in a distinctly different manner than the traditional, as decorative gables and entrance decorations, their presence symbolic of a 'lost paradise'.

All of this historical evolution has left the brick with a very varied image and symbolic significance which is then taken up in the second part of the thesis by an analysis of the associative and significatory aspects of brick (to be continued...)

Deep Crustal Research

Not many posts recently as I have been away for the past two weeks on holiday in Italy. I visited Lake Garda on it's northern shore at a town called Riva where the lake is hemmed in by the dramatic craggy slopes of the Dolomites. While I was there, I visited the Mart Museum in the nearby town of Rovereto. This new museum of contemporary art is certainly worth a visit. It is beautifully designed and has one of Italy's most important collections of modern art. I went there particularly to see the Maurice Denis exhibition, but also had time to walk around the 20th Century galleries where paintings by Alberto Burri particularly caught my eye.

I say 'paintings' but in fact these wall hangings are more like sculptural reliefs. The materials used to create the reliefs: large black rectangular tableaux covered in what looks like dried and cracked bitumen is "acrovinilico on cellotex". There's a nice example of this type of work here (4th image down). Notice the change in the pattern of the cracks passing down the relief. At the top of the relief the cracking pattern is broadly spaced while at the base it is finer. The reliefs housed at Rovereto show similar effects and when you examine them you see that the fine cracks develop where the 'acrovinilico' is thinner. Where it is spread thickly, the cracks develop further apart.

This work was carried out by Burri in the mid-1970s. Clearly he is working with modern art materials rather than natural clays (although reliefs housed at UCLA are said to be of 'fired ceramic'), however, the inspiration seems to be rooted in the reproduction of patterns seen in nature such as mud cracks on the dried out margins of lakes.

On returning to Paris, I tried to find out more about Burri and his art. He was born in 1915 and died in 1995. He was a succesful artist who won a number of awards and whose work was typified by the use of uncoventional materials in an abstract expressionist style. His most extraordinary work is a memorial to the town of Gibellina, Western Sicily, which was devastated by an earthquake in 1968. The town was entirely relocated and Burri proposed that the ruins be preserved beneath a sheet of thick concrete, only the roads of the town preserved. The result can be see in the short article at greg.org both at ground level and in an aerial view. The aerial view shows that there are striking similarities between the cracked "acrovinylico" reliefs and the patterns of roads running through the town.

Through his use of unusual materials, Burri had skillfully made a link between the drying paterns of mud and the development of a town. Because human settlement is like drying mud. From the first pitched tents and flocks of sheep which are fluid as wet mud, sliding across the hills, to the first ramshackle huts, congealing out of nothing, to the first rude track between a line of shelters, plots for building, and hardened outlines, cracking, pulling what's mine to what's mine, erecting hard defensive walls on either side of cracks, which are streets, no man's lands, labyrinthine, turning this way and that, but ultimately (if the builders could only see it) controlled by rules that are as natural as the drying of mud.

And finally, ironically, other cracks, underneath men's cracks, deep cracks in the earth's crust, shake it all down. No wonder Burri was interested in the depth of his "acrovinilico" and it's relation to the size of the cracks he created. He was doing deep crustal research.