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"A common, ordinary brick," says Woody Harrelson, playing an architect in
the movie, Indecent Proposal (1993), "wants to be something more than
it is." Harrelson proceeds to turn this proposition into a metaphor for the
human condition, something never envisioned by the real architect who served
as an inspiration for the movie monologue. It was Louis I. Kahn (1903-1974)
who first posed a question in the early 1970s that has since attained
legendary status within architectural circles: "What do you want, brick?"
The answer, according to Kahn, is that brick wants to be an arch and not
merely an infill or cladding material with no structural role. In fact, a
key to understanding brick as a modern architectural material lies precisely
in its dual potential to be both structure and cladding. For the greater
part of the history of architecture, brick walls assumed both roles,
simultaneously supporting floors and roof while at the same time providing
enclosure. It is only since the late 19th century that it has become
possible to separate those roles by creating an independent framework of
steel or reinforced concrete (structure) to which exterior brick may be
attached (cladding). In this case, the brick no longer supports the floors
and roof, although its appearance as cladding may well obscure this
fundamental distinction.
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Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal |
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The
real architect: Louis Kahn |
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From the Kahnian viewpoint, brick as mere cladding was inherently suspect.
But other Modernists were equally distrustful of brick as load-bearing
structure, since this seemed to negate the idea of the "free plan," the
independence of structural framework from means of enclosure, and the
opportunities for large glass areas. In fact, an influential faction of
early 20th-century Modern architects and theorists eschewed the use of brick
in any form, associating it with the 19th-century cultural forces they were
attempting to overcome. They lobbied instead for the 20th century's
revolutionary new materials of construction: glass, steel, and reinforced
concrete. Where construction with brick walls was still found expedient
within this context, a coat of plaster could transform the deviant surface
into something acceptably plane and neutral. As a symbol of
traditional culture and pre-industrial technology, brick was an easy target.
But brick's traditional role as load-bearing structure was also legitimately
challenged by the need for greater heights and larger spans in the new
commercial and industrial structures of the 19th and 20th centuries; and by
the ascendency of heterogeneous, layered exterior wall systems that could
accommodate air and vapor barriers, thermal insulation, and an air space
(cavity) to block the migration of water through exterior walls.
In spite of this, brick was never rejected absolutely and was, on the
contrary, often found capable of embodying precisely the abstract formal
values that helped define the new Modernist aesthetic. Even load-bearing
brick buildings remained influential well into the 20th century, acting as a
kind of conservative moral datum of "honest" construction (what the brick
really "wanted to be") opposed to some, but not all, Modern tendencies.
Architects continued to use brick with enthusiasm and, like Frank Lloyd
Wright (1867-1959), boasted that in their hands the ordinary brick became
"worth its weight in gold." Other practitioners, however, were less
confident about the appropriateness of brick in modern construction; for
them, brick represented a kind of compromise—accepted with various degrees
of ambivalence—between the new culture, technology, and aesthetics of the
20th century, and that which preceded it. At the same time, brick itself was
subject to technological change, evidenced not only in the increased
systemization of its manufacture, begun in the late 12th century and
culminating in the 19th century's relentless mechanization of all aspects of
the brick-making process, but in the application of Frederick Taylor's
theory of scientific management to bricklaying in the first decades of the
1900s.
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Bernham: Monadnock Building |
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Berlage: Amsterdam Stock Exchange |
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Sullivan: Wainwright Building |
Brick was widely used throughout the 20th century, accommodated within
virtually all styles. The chronological survey that follows is therefore
necessarily incomplete and somewhat arbitrary. That being said, several key
developments can be highlighted, starting with the period before the first
World War. Already, a number of trends may be discerned in the late
19th-century that continued to be played out well into the 20th century. The
first may be illustrated by Daniel Burnham's design for the Monadnock
Building in Chicago (1889) and H.P. Berlage's Amsterdam Stock Exchange
(1903), both of which pointed the way towards a reinterpretation of brick
informed by the Modernist bias towards simple, relatively unornamented
surfaces, even when used in load-bearing wall construction. A second, more
complex tendency can be seen in the brick facade of Louis Sullivan's
Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1890) which, while functioning as
non-structural cladding, was meant to express symbolically the "idea" of the
steel framework behind it. What resulted, though, was a certain
ambiguity—some would call it deceit—in which the actual construction of the
building was severed from its outward form.
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Poelzig: Chemical plant at Luban |
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Gropius and Meyer: Fagus Works (top) and Werkbund exhibition model
factory (bottom) |
A third trend derives from 19th-century brick-walled factory buildings
characterized by flat brick surfaces, functional massing, and the use—at
least internally—of heavy timber or cast iron structural elements. In Hans
Poelzig's chemical plant at Luban (1911) the asymmetric massing and
unornamented surfaces were distinctly Modern; in contrast, the small,
rectangular and arched window openings that punctuated the brick walls
evoked a pre-modern sensibility. On the other hand, the Fagus Works factory
in Alfeld an der Leine (1911) and the model factory, Werkbund exhibition,
Cologne (1914) by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer—both brick-clad
buildings—contained elements of classical axiality in their massing, while
their innovative glass curtain walls, when photographed from the proper
perspective, gave the buildings a dynamic Modern appearance.
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Poelzig: Upper Silesia Tower |
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An additional variation on this theme can be seen in Poelzig's Upper Silesia
Tower in Posen (1911) where brick cladding is clearly expressed as
non-structural "infill" within an actual structural frame exposed on the
building's surface. But this remained a minority position, in part because
the exposure of an actual skeletal framework, especially of steel, invites
problems with corrosion, differential thermal movement, water and air
infiltration, and the continuity of thermal insulation. Instead, it is
Sullivan's attitude valuing formal expression above "truth in construction"
that informs most brick architecture in the early 20th century. For example,
many of Wright's early projects, including the Larkin Building in Buffalo
(1904), the Robie House in Hyde Park (1909), and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo
(1916), though nominally load-bearing brick structures, were filled with
hidden steel and concrete elements that allowed his formal vision to be
actualized.
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Wright: Larkin Building |
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Wright: Imperial Hotel |
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Wright: Robie House |
Finally, a fourth trend combining the textural possibilities of brick
bonding patterns with an interest in free-form massing and romantic
silhouette finds an analogue in certain so-called "Expressionist" projects
from the early 20th century: examples include Michael de Klerk's Eigen
Haard, and Piet Kramer's De Dageraad housing estates in Amsterdam (1917 and
1923 respectively), in which otherwise straight-forward brick facades are
enlivened with curvilinear brick elements and decorative treatments.
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Klerk: Eigen Haard housing |
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Kramer: De Dageraad housing |
Between the two World Wars, brick was employed by a younger generation of
European Modernists experimenting with new spacial concepts informed by
notions of Cartesian orthogonality and populated by interpenetrating planes
and abstract cubic masses. In particular, the early work of Mies van der
Rohe, starting with his brick villa project of 1923, and including his
houses for Wolf (1925), Lange (1927) and Esters (1927), as well as his
Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) attempted to reconcile
these new formal attitudes with traditional brick bearing-wall construction.
But more commonly, where load-bearing brick was present, it was covered up
with a smooth plaster finish, as in Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in
Potsdam (1921), Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder House in Utrecht (1924), or
J.J.P. Oud's Kiefhook Housing Estate in Rotterdam (1930). In the United
States, architects seemed less interested in the ideological struggle
between an evolving Modernist aesthetic and the use of traditional
materials: brick was used as a primary cladding material in Raymond Hood's
American Radiator (American Standard) Building (1923); and, combined with
stainless steel, in William Van Alen's sumptuous Chrysler Building (1930).
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Rietveld: Schroder House |
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Mies: Monument to Liebnecht and Luxemburg |
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Mendelsohn: Einstein Tower |
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Van
Alen: Chrysler Building |
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Hood: American Radiator Building |
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After the second World War the use of brick, in both load-bearing walls and
exterior cladding, was revitalized by a new interest in raw materials of
construction that could be expressed in an aggressively straight-forward
manner. Of several such projects by Le Corbusier in France and India, the
most influential was his pair of houses, the Maisons Jaoul at
Neuilly-sur-Seine (1955), consisting of brick load-bearing walls supporting
concrete-covered—but brick-faced—Catalan vaults. This so-called "Brutalist"
aesthetic, in which brick was juxtaposed against deliberately-exposed steel
or concrete structural members, reappeared in buildings such as the Langham
House Development at Ham Common, London, by James Stirling and James Gowan
(1958), and in several projects by Louis Kahn including the Phillips Exeter
Acadamy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire (1972) and the Indian Institute of
Management at Ahmedabad, India (1974). It is only with these projects by
Kahn that the traditional load-bearing brick arch was finally permitted to
enter the vocabulary of 20th-century architecture.
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Le
Corbusier: Maisons Jaoul |
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Stirling and Gowan: Ham Common |
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Kahn: Exeter Library |
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Kahn: Institute of Management |
Mies: I.I.T.
Smithsons: Hunstanton School
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But having been once let in, load-bearing brick,
whether as wall, pier, or arch, has had little further impact on
20th-century architecture. Instead, it is primarily as
non-structural cladding that brick has made its presence felt, even
within the Brutalist oeuvre. Mies' academic buildings at I.I.T.,
designed at the end of the second World War, used brick and
steel as cladding over the actual steel framework: the brick appears
ambiguously as both infill within, and foundation for, an elegantly
detailed—but non-structural—grid of painted steel. Yet the fact that
the brick (and steel) could be seen on both the inside and outside
gave the construction a perverse kind of integrity, and it served as
a role model for numerous other buildings, including the
self-consciously Brutalist Hunstanton School in Norfolk, England,
designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1949. |
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Kahn: Richards Medical Research Building |
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Franzen: Agronomy Building |
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Davis and Brody: Waterside |
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Aalto: Baker House Dorm |
During this time brick cladding became an accepted part of the Modernist
oeuvre, representing a compromise in which the historically-resonant surface
qualities of brick were fully integrated within the Modernist vocabulary of
unadorned orthogonal planes and cubic mass; of articulated solid and void.
Kahn's influential Richards Medical Research Building at the University of
Pennsylvania (1961), with its expansive, windowless brick surfaces, spawned
numerous derivative works including Ulrich Franzen's Agronomy Laboratory at
Cornell University (1968) and Davis and Brody's Waterside Housing in New
York City (1975). Earlier, Alvar Aalto, in his Baker House dormitory at
M.I.T. (1949) and Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland (1952), made of the brick
surface an even more explicit medium for the play of sensuality,
imperfection, and historic reference.
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Venturi: Guild House |
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SITE: Best "Peeling Project" Showroom |
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Yet this compromise proved unstable. In the latter part of the 20th century,
references to tradition involving brick, however stylized or ironic, became
less constrained by the modernist formal aesthetic and more overtly rooted
in historical precedent. A key moment in the development of this
"Post-Modernism" was the Guild House in Philadelphia (1963) by Robert
Venturi. His axially-positioned brick arch—nominally a load-bearing form,
but here purposefully articulated as non-structural cladding—acted like a
sign pointing to an intellectual attitude about history rather than as
an attempt at some kind of reconciliation. James Wines and his group SITE
produced a series of architectural projects beginning in the early 1970s
that used various characteristics of brick walls as a starting point for an
ironic integration of sculpture and architecture. This attitude, as in
Venturi's Guild House, addressed not only brick forms as construction
systems—SITE's use of "peeling," "notched," and "crumbling" brick walls was
directed more at brick as cladding and at the recent banal history of
big-box retail design—but also at the class-stratified culture supported by
such projects. That issues of class became intertwined with the use of brick
is illustrated as well by the so-called "red-brick" novelists in post-war
Britain, associated with the "red-brick" universities (not the older and
elite "stone" universities of Oxford and Cambridge), and the coincident
phenomenon of Brutalist buildings in which the deployment of brick was meant
to invoke a kind of working-class solidarity.
In a similar vein, American corporate Post-Modern office skyscrapers of
the 1980s were generally clad with thin stone veneer rather than brick.
Nevertheless, brick continued to be widely used in Post-Modern residences,
schools, and related occupancies; a building that typifies the genre is the
condominium project on 70th Street, New York, by Kohn Pedersen Fox (1987),
in which a smooth, unadorned brick surface appears to support stylized stone
moldings and pediments that step back much like the New York skyscrapers of
the 1920s and 1930s. In Europe, a far different Post-Modernism emerged
favoring a synthesis of classical and "platonic" geometric elements within
which the Kahnian essence of brick—its weight, compressive strength, and
solidity—were valued and exploited. Aldo Rossi's Burial Chapel in Giussano
(1987); and Mario Botta's design for a private house in Vacallo (1989) may
serve as examples of this tendency.
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Kohn Pedersen Fox: Condominium project |
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Botta: House in Vacallo |
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Rossi: Burial Chapel |
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Eisenman: Wexner Center |
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Whether embraced, hidden, disowned, contrasted with more modern materials,
or co-opted within a new aesthetic, brick has played an active role within
the cultures of both Modern and Post-Modern architecture. In contrast,
so-called "Deconstructivist" architecture in the final decades of the 20th
century has virtually ignored brick, reverting to the radical Modernist
dogma in which abstract geometric surface and mass; the play of solid and
void; the iconography of machine and grid; and the "new" materials of glass,
steel, and concrete (or its non-structural analogue, stucco) are once more
combined, albeit in a self-consciously distorted and fragmented way.
Characteristically, where Deconstuctivist brick appears most famously—in
Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio
(1990)—it is as a fragmented and stylized archeological reconstruction of an
armory denoting the site's past history, rather than as "the building"
itself.
During the course of the 20th century, as traditional load-bearing forms
of construction encountered new structural and environmental systems as well
as new functional and spatial needs, and as traditional architectural
paradigms encountered new forms of aesthetic expression, the answers to the
question posed rhetorically by Kahn—"What do you want, brick?"—have shifted
accordingly. That brick has continued to be commonly employed as cladding,
in the face of competition from more modern and technologically
sophisticated materials, is evidence enough that its non-structural
qualities—reasonable cost, flexibility, durability, impact resistance, and
visual appearance—continue to be valued.
Further reading:
The history of brick in 20th century architecture can be pieced together
from readings in general architectural histories and in the accounts of
individual architects, but sections or chapters dealing specifically with
brick are unusual. Notable exceptions include Giedion, Sigfried, Space,
Time and Architecture, 5th edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967; and Patterson, Terry, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Meaning of
Materials, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994. For a good general
reference dealing with the production, properties, and historical use of
brick, see: Plumridge, Andrew and Meulenkamp, Wim, Brickwork:
Architecture and Design, New York: Abrams, 1993.
Building construction textbooks also contain information on bricks; an
excellent chapter which includes a short history of brick masonry can be
found in: Allen, Edward, Fundamentals of Building Construction, 3rd
edition, New York: Wiley, 1999.
The Brick Industry Association (BIA) publishes numerous books and
technical articles on brick construction which can be ordered at 11490
Commerce Park Drive, Reston, VA 22091. Alternatively, refer to their web
site at http://www.bia.org/; especially
their link to "technical notes."
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