The joy of bricks

We naturally tend to take our surroundings for granted. One of the joys of studying anything is that you notice things you never noticed before. I am lucky enough to be able to cycle to work. It is only a brief cycle ride, taking some 15 minutes and as I tend to be half asleep, I have inevitably fallen into the habit of taking the same route every day, which I know to be slightly shorter than the alternatives. Being in central London, most of the buildings I pass are built of brick. This morning I did a quick count and the tally came to 236 brick buildings.

Slightly off my normal route is a small building in Clerkenwell on the corner of Britton Street and Clerkenwell Road. It is not particularly old (it was constructed in 1885) but it is a riot of beautiful rubbed and gauged brickwork in deep red bricks – a nice change from the ubiquitous yellow London stock. It has always struck me as remarkable that so much care should have been lavished on this apparently otherwise rather modest structure.

Compare the concern that went into this brickwork with the joyless blocks of 1970s flats I also pass on the way to work every day. They too have brickwork, but it sits within a concrete frame that is exposed and gathers dirt in the choking London air. Forlorn stretcher bond, with grey bricks in grey mortar: this is dull boring brickwork, the sort of thing that gives brick a bad name.

Good brickwork can be wonderful, but so much brickwork today is bland and monotonous. As an architect, I think our profession can and should take some of the blame. Brick is an outstanding material that requires vision and understanding. You need to talk to bricklayers and visit brickyards. You need to use your eyes and your imagination. The great architects of the 20th century – Le Corbusier, Mies van de Rohe and Aalto – all understood this.

Marketing brick to architects seems to be an unenviable task. Nevertheless there is so much more that could be done to promote new ways of using bricks and to communicate these new ideas to designers. That is where the emphasis should be – on innovation, yet this seems to be where the industry is failing to get its message across.

To a certain extent, the problem is as old as bricks themselves. When bricks were first fired, more than 5000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the complexity of the firing process ensured that it immediately became a separate trade. From that moment onwards brick manufacturing has been separated from bricklaying. This has been true in virtually every nation and every period. Sometimes the two trades worked closely together, but more often than not the brickmakers had little to do with the people who used their products. This worked fine when there were few alternatives to using bricks but less well when fashions changed. The architect now has a bewildering variety of materials and products at his or her disposal, but bricklayers are still freelance operators. Their trade has not advanced much in centuries. Brickmaking, meanwhile, has changed radically and has been turned into a highly-mechanised manufacturing industry. Yet the attitude has always been that it is up to the architect or engineer to devise wonderful new ways to use these products. I think this is naive.

Consider one of the most successful brick marketing exercises ever undertaken: that by the toy manufacturer Lego. Unlike the real thing, the company always sells its toy bricks with ideas on what you could do with them. It employs teams of designers to devise new and exciting models built with standard bricks. They have even created theme parks to show off their potential and employed famous artists and designers to produce works in Lego.

Imagine what would have happened if Lego had just sent out catalogues of brick types to children showing them what colours were available, how much they cost a hundred or the latest new shape of brick that Lego had devised. Imagine they had then waited for children to build things in Lego, and only then promoted their bricks using pictures of these children's models. And yet that is exactly how manufacturers tend to market bricks to architects.

Fancy a trip to Brick-Land, anyone?