The identity of a brick

Written by Derk Ringers, MA Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins

In 1979, the band Pink Floyd released 'Another brick in the wall'. The word brick is used to symbolise a loss of identity. Just another brick in the wall refers to being just another ubiquitous person in a Kafkaesque school system. Bricks have become semiotically synonymous with ubiquity which diminishes the value of the bricks. Like the song suggests, a brick is considered more ubiquitous once constructed in its intended structure. This transformation lowers perceived cultural value and makes bricks less prone for future re-purposing.

The identification of building materials is practiced in architecture through material passports. The materials used in construction are identified through measurements like weight, dimensions and recycle or reuse ability. However, materials that do not qualify for the required measurements, due to loss of technical quality or aesthetic decline, do not qualify for identification through a material passport. Since measurements of a material are directly linked to the identity of the material, could alternative modes of measurement provide alternative perspectives in which we consider the future repurposing of bricks? This became the premise of the project. In doing so, redeem used bricks from a useless conception.

The visual language of a brick tells stories that are influenced by three different factors. The clay of which the brick is made reveals the geological build-up of the area from which it is extracted. Material, together with the production method, determines the color and texture. The shape is designed, mostly based on ergonomics and taste. It is no coincidence that the shape of a brick fits perfectly hand in the builders. When bricks are too small, it will take longer to build a wall but if it is too big it will be too uncomfortable to do the repetitive work. These two factors have homogenised the design of bricks in a way. However, within these limited parameters, there is an array of different brick sizes available that are to this day, largely based on historic place-specific parameters.

The fact that bricks now are still produced to replicate the sizes, colors, and textures of classic bricks, shows that is a cultural appreciation for the visual identity of bricks. However, in the 1960s mortar cement became stronger than bricks, making the disassembly of bricks economically more difficult. The demolition of a wall would mean that the bricks lose their shape and the attached mortar would be difficult to remove. This stops bricks from being repurposed.

Projects like Lendager Group’s Resource Rows project in Copenhagen, have challenged these modes of consumption by cutting out pieces of façade with the brick and mortar combined and reconfiguring them in new construction in a bricolage manner. By using elements of the pre-existing brick configurations, the cultural integrity is preserved whilst the implementation is adjusted for contemporary constructions. However, the complex problem of reusing bricks with stronger mortar is solved by using specialised methods which, are still difficult to recreate in more conventional projects.

In this sense, the brick has been undergone a cultural transformation. Bricks are a relatively easy building material, designed so people can create strong structures. However, progressions in building materials have rendered bricks unnecessary and are nowadays mostly used for nostalgic aesthetic purposes rather than actually being irreplaceable in a building's structural integrity. This loss of agency over our constructed world on an individual level inspired two experiments. To see if brick and mortar could be physically separated using non specialised tools and, trying different methods of re-implementing useless bricks.

After finding a chunk of brick and mortar at a construction site nearby. The first attempt to measure the effort of separating bricks was to use a hammer, screwdriver and a metal saw and, to estimate my metabolic rate using my heart rate in order to express the output in effort. After a brief moment of trying though, it was clear that these efforts were pretty much useless.

For the second attempt, I decided to use cleaning vinegar. Cleaning vinegar is used to clean up access mortar from tiles so, I figured I could measure the amount of vinegar it takes to dissolve the mortar. To dissolve all the mortar seemed to be wishful thinking. In the beginning, the reaction was very evident. The whole bucked was fizzing audible like a freshly poured cola. However, after 4 days the reaction had stopped, the mortar was still there. Despite that, a combination of both methods was successful since the mortar had weakened enough in order to be separated with the non-specialised tools.

Conventional digital design tools are orientated on the implementation of unused materials. The idea to challenge these modes of designing was to work from physical to digital rather than digital to physical, by using photogrammetry to digitally capture useless brick in 3D. Photogrammetry works by taking many pictures of an object from every possible angle. This will provide enough information for the photogrammetry software to recreate a digital 3D model of the object. I used this method on several useless bricks to create an array of models which could be used to create new configurations. One of the factors that made this process difficult was resolution.

Working with a construction and applying bricks as a material texture takes less computing power than reconstructing individual bricks into structures. This was evident in the long periods of processing and frequent crashes. The whole purpose of designing from physical to was to create a method that is not biased towards homogenised virgin materials. Yet, trying to accomplish that using existing and available tools has seemed to expose the complications that come with it.

To come back to the original intention of the project, to find alternative methods of measurements in order to find value in useless materials. Arguably, the experiments have failed. When trying to separate bricks using non-specialised tools was too time and effort consuming to scale up. Likewise, applying alternative methods of measuring digitally, did not prove to be efficient. Still, it did help to recontextualise the contemporary value of bricks throughout its life cycle.

The typical description of measurement is to quantify the length, size or amount of a certain object. This description only establishes the technical value of the said object and may neglect other modes of value. By thinking of measurement in alternative ways we may contextualise an object differently, exposing complexities constructed between the object and its surroundings. Experimenting with forms of brick measurements, which might have been naively unconventional, revealed rigidness and dependencies of commercial brick implementation, as well as the difficulty of stepping away

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