BRICK

“A common, ordinary brick,” says Woody Harrelson, playing an architect in the movie Indecent Pr oposa l
(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’s monologue. It was Louis
I.Kahn (1903–74) 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 in-fill 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 might well obscure this fundamental distinction.
From the Kahnian viewpoint, brick as mere cladding was inherently suspect.
However, other modernists were equally distrustful of brick as load-bearing structure, as
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 that 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 plain and neutral. As a symbol of
traditional culture and pre-industrial technology, brick was an easy target. However,
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 ascendancy 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.
Nevertheless, 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
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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 those that 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 20th century.
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 high-lighted,
starting with the period before World War I. Already, a number of trends can be
discerned in the late 19th century that continued to be played out well into the 20th. The
first can 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 toward a reinterpretation of brick informed by the modernist bias toward
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 Wain-wright Building in St. Louis (1890), which, while functioning as
nonstructural 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.
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 premodern sensibility. On the other hand, the Fagus Werk factory in Alfeld-ander-
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. 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 nonstructural “infill”
within an actual structural frame exposed on the building’s surface. However, 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 Chicago
(1909), and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916), although nominally load-bearing brick
structures, were filled with hidden steel and concrete elements that allowed his formal
vision to be actualized.
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 straightforward brick
facades are enlivened with curvilinear brick elements and decorative treatments.
Between the two world wars, brick was employed by a younger generation of
European modernists experimenting with new spatial 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),
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attempted to reconcile these new formal attitudes with traditional brick-bearing wall
construction. However, 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), and 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).
After World War II, 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 straightforward 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 concretecovered—
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 Academy 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.
However, 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
nonstructural cladding that brick has made its presence felt, even within the Brutalist
oeuvre. Mies’s academic buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), designed
at the end of World War II, used brick and steel as cladding over the actual steel framework:
the brick appears ambiguously as both in-fill within, and foundation for, an elegantly
detailed—but nonstructural—grid of painted steel. Yet the fact that the brick (and steel)
could be seen on both the inside and the outside gave the construction a perverse kind of
integrity, and it served as a role model for numerous other buildings, including the selfconsciously
Brutalist Hunstanton School in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and
Peter Smithson in 1949.
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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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.
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
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modernist formal aesthetic and more overtly rooted in historical precedent. A key
moment in the development of this Postmodernism 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 nonstructural cladding—acted like a s ign 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 brick forms not only 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 as the classstratified
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 postwar
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 Postmodern office skyscrapers of the 1980s
were generally clad with thin stone veneer rather than brick. Nevertheless, brick
continued to be widely used in Postmodern 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 Postmodernism 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) serve as examples of this tendency.
Whether embraced, hidden, disowned, contrasted with more modern materials, or
coopted within a new aesthetic, brick has played an active role within the cultures of both
modern and Postmodern 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 nonstructural analogue, stucco) are once more combined, albeit in a selfconsciously
distorted and fragmented way. Characteristically, where deconstructivist
brick appears most famously—in Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts
(1990) in Columbus, Ohio—it is as a fragmented and stylized archaeological
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 loadbearing 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
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sophisticated materials is evidence enough that its nonstructural qualities—reasonable
cost, flexibility, durability, impact resistance, and visual appearance—continue to be
valued.