Historic Brickwork: A Design Resource, with Calder Loth

thank you for coming out to hear about a subject which i find fascinating and i hope you will too and that is brick so i think to dive right into it we're going to start with real obric and that's roman brick because the romans well they did a very important thing they learned how to fire bricks to make fire the clay to make the bricks really hard because up until then most of the bricks were mud bricks sun-dried so roman bricks are very durable and roman bricks provided the main structure for most of the buildings of ancient rome but they didn't leave the bricks exposed they usually covered them over with plaster or marble veneer and we see the basilica mexican constantine which is now stripped of nearly all of its ornament and we see in this arch here they're very precise construction of brick in roman times now roman bricks are very thin they're almost slabs the average size was 12 by three and a half by just one and a half inches thick and i cut out a piece of paper to give you some idea of a roman rig it's very thin this is about the standard size now they look bigger than this because we're not filling in visually with the mortar joints roman can be quite sophisticated this is the market of trajan showing broke impediments full in tablature nice arches but you have to remember that this was originally covered over with plaster the brick wasn't meant to be shown it was a structural element rather than a decorative element not to be exposed interestingly in the late 19th early 20th century roman brick became very fashionable again you see a lot of american renaissance buildings built of roman brick such as carnegie hall these very thin bricks nice golden color or in philadelphia red roman bricks here thin golden yellow bricks in this house next door not that unusual now roman breaks are perfectly um acquirable today they go online and you can find companies that make roman bricks that you can buy and i wish we'd use more of it of course being from richmond i have to show a richmond example this lovely golden speckled brick here used in our main streets railroad station with a lot of rich terra cotta decoration but roman rick really makes this i think a really fascinating um impressive work of architecture and frank lloyd wright knew the advantage of roman brick because of its overwhelming horizontality it was perfect for the horizontality of his prairie style houses such as the roby house in chicago again roman bricks are perfectly acquirable today and i hope people will realize that this and many of the other examples of bricks i show um our design resources that can be used for modern architecture we don't realize the design advantages of brick to be very subtle but very beautiful in their own ways okay just a quick word about brick making in the colonial period we were making breaks in virginia in the early 17th century bricks in colonial period usually made on site using wooden moles this is a real 18th century wooden mold the molds were dusted with sand a very fine sand as you see in this demonstration here so the wet clay wouldn't adhere to the sides of the brick mold it'd slip out easily and that gave the brakes a kind of granular surface now that wasn't true in new england the predominant way of making bricks up there's what they call slop joints instead of dusting the molds with sand they dipped them in water and that made the the clay slip out more easily and then they were sent for firing in kills such as this this is a demonstration in williamsburg you build this big big structure here put all the bricks in here that the green bricks that are to be fired you have these fire channels in which you stick logs and you burn it for about seven days or so you've got to be very careful to modulate the temperature if you let it get too hot you're going to end up with one huge brick if you don't fire it exactly right you get an awful lot of waste and there was a lot of waste under any circumstance maybe 20 30 percent of the bricks were not all that usable or not hard enough to abuse particularly in exterior walls now the art of making bricks from the roman period pretty much died out in the dark ages in the dark ages and middle ages most buildings were wooden structures or fortified buildings were made out of stone brick making almost disappeared but was revived in the particularly in england in the tudor period and a foremost example of that is hampton court palace built for cardinal woolsey and it was such an impressive palace that henry viii said i want that for myself so he kicked woolsey out and took it over but this really made brick architecture fashionable it was a it became a royal palace and lots of medieval towns and villages were rebuilt in brick in a big period of rebuilding in the tudor period such as we see here in kingsland these post-medieval structures date pretty much from the tudor period um still get timber-framed buildings but they would fill in the in between the timber members with with brick infield brick noggin it was called sometimes they would cover it over with plaster some and later on they would cover it over with what they call tile hangings but lots of brick structures coming in the tutor period all right we're now going to look at some brick bonds how do you make these bricks structurally sound make a strict strict structure out of them oh the primary bond used in the tudor period and in england well into the 19th century and even today was what we call english bond it was so common in europe or in england then that they pretty much just called it common bond and it was not only for building uh walls but for retaining walls for bridges lots of english structure is built out of what we would call english bond and it's mainly just a functional bond not be meant to be very decorative it's a row of stretchers sides of bricks alternating with a row of headers ends of bricks and you start them off with a little brick fragment called a queen closer so that the vertical joints don't align that's english bond very common bond in britain and we look at again these buildings at king's lynn they're all english bond row of stretchers alternating with the row of headers in every other course it's the strongest bond the earliest dateable building in virginia is this structure bacon's castle dating from the 1660s now this gives a very false impression what most people were living in in the 17th century in virginia most of them were living in earth past structures which have all disappeared this was a very exceptional building for its time with curvilinear dutch type gables diagonally set chimneys and in hijacking style but the wall we look up close as you would expect is all english bond a row of stretchers alternating with a row of headers in every course and you see this little shelf here that's called a water table and that's just caused by the thickness of the foundation the thickness was it was expressed on the exterior of the building so you get this little shelf because foundation got to hold up an awful lot of bricks has to be a lot thicker than the main wall and then we have a relieving arch over this basement window and that's to spread the weight there's an awful lot of weight coming down on this window here so this spreads that weight around on either side a relieving arch it relieves the wind of that of all that pressure again not a very decorative bond a functional bond and you see it has very granular surface um because a break those were lined with um with sand english bond continued to be used for the entire structure particularly in virginia up into the early couple of decades of the 17th century 18th century and then it just passed out of fashion it was still used in the foundations as we will see but you rarely see a whole building built of english bond as you do in this 1720s house and i'll come back to this in a little while to show you some of the detailing on it however english bond continued to be used in other places such as charleston south carolina well into the late 18th century for side walls here front wall you can see is stuccoed over but sidewalls are all in english bond and english months saw a revival in the early 20th century with the fashion of doing tudor revival style buildings such as this big house in richmond virginia correctly it's all in english bond as you would expect of a real tudor building and even in some institutional buildings now virginians are all anglophiles so they want their institutional buildings to look like english buildings so we have a georgian style virginia museum of fine arts for which english bond was used throughout the building which i like here i think it gives this building some character it's a big monumental building and this strong bond i think is appropriate for this type of building all right a couple of odd bonds dutch cross bond and english cross bond what are we talking about dutch cross bond in amsterdam particularly and nearly all 17th and early 18th century brick architecture in the netherlands is in what we call dutch cross bond here is a close-up of dutch cross bond it's like english bond a row of stretchers alternating with a row of headers but in a very particular way let's look at a header above it is a joint below it is a stretcher let's look at another header above it is a stretcher below it is a joint it alternates like this it's not that easy to light so that you get diagonal step patterns throughout the wall like this these diagonal step patterns survive dutch brakes are very small six by three by one and three-fourths that's not a big brick here is about the size of a dutch brick it's a little thin brick pretty universal for dutch buildings and dutch brickwork diagonals and interestingly in holland they produce an awful lot of little yellow dutch bricks which are often used for paving and these yellow bricks were imported to england in some quantity and some of them actually made it to virginia in the early 17th century found in an archaeological site some yellow dutch bricks particularly one in the middle here and look at the scale it's only about an inch and a half thick not many of these are found but maybe they were brought over for paving or maybe a hearth but not much more there just weren't that many of them we very often hear that bill early colonial buildings were built here the bricks brought over from england well some of them were brought over as ballast but you have to remember that it takes nearly a hundred thousand bricks to build a two-story brick building that's maybe 45 by 45. so no we didn't bring that many bricks over here to build buildings like bacon's castle they were built on site and very often houses were located near a clay deposit because the bricks were built and formed on site and were formed in temporary kills called clamps so when you say english brick or find english brick written into the record what they normally mean is an english statute break that was a standard size decreed by law in the tudor period um now over here we didn't follow the rules all that quickly so there can be variation in sizes of bricks but this is about the size of an english statute break here again this looks small to us because we're not counting visually for the mortar joints around it but this is an english statute break okay in some cases up north uh such as on this dutch manor house van courtland manor early 18th century you see some dutch yellow bricks probably imported used to get tight fit at the window jams and in this dutch colonial house in old kinderhook new york done with red clay rather than yellow clay these bricks are undoubtedly made on site but if you look carefully there are these small dutch bricks and if you look you can see the diagonal patterning in the way they're laid english or dutch cross bond okay now english cross bond is exactly the same thing except they're using english size bricks rather than dutch rigs now this is a 20th century apartment house using english crossbond and you see it creates these same diagonal patterns throughout the wall i wish we'd use more of it i think it can make a building very interesting but one example which is quite striking is the old church of christ in wethersfield connecticut if you look kind of cross-eyed at it you can see the diagonal patterning running through the brickwork here gives some liveliness to a brick wall and it saw some revival in the 20th century here's a building by mckim eden white down at the university of north carolina and if you look carefully at it you can see it is english cross bond with the diagonal patterning running through wall surface and a very recent example of that is this reconstructed chapel of a version of a jesuit chapel at st mary's city in maryland completed latest 2007. and i guess in the archaeological debris of this church they had some indication that it was english cross bond and if you can look at the wall you can see these diagonal patterns running through but so far i have not seen an early example of this in virginia or even maryland for that for that matter except for this one now you see these holes in the brick those are called put log holes because when you build a brick wall you have to stand the masons have to stand on scaffolding and the scaffolding was anchored into the walls as they went up and normally as they finished the building and took the scaffolding down they would usually fill in these put log holes but not often you can find put log holes in colonial buildings there's one in williamsburg on the duke of gloucester street still has put log holes in it and so every christmas the owner peels those put log holes as nice big apples for christmas decoration okay flemish bond the standard bond particularly for fine quality buildings and facades later on in the 18th and early 19th century it's a decorative bond and flemish bond is a stretcher alternating with a header alternating with a stretcher in every course throughout the wall surface and to get the headers centered over the stretchers you have to start out the wall with a little queen closer here or you can do it with a three-quarter three-quarter-sized brick called a king closer now flemish bond as far as we know was done in flanders and some of those flemish masons came over to england in the 17th century there's not much of it there uh some people are not exactly sure scholars are not exactly sure where flemish bond really originated i've seen a version of it in munich some say it's versions of it in poland but for our purposes the first really serious example of flemish bond in britain is this house the so-called dutch house q palace in kew gardens it's out of london dating from the 1630s a very elaborate display of brickwork here maybe you can make out here that it is the main wall surfaces are flemish bond and as far as most brickwork scholars in britain are concerned there are no other earlier examples of building using flemish bond throughout the entire wall in england so this was a landmark structure and it's important for dating purposes for instance this is saint luke's church in alawite county virginia traditionally dated to the 1630s well yes it's a gothic style building what we call remembered forms because when the settlers came over here they built parish churches remembering how they looked in england which were old medieval gothic style churches so this gothic building and everybody wants to think that this is the oldest church of anglo america 1630s i always questioned that date because the church is entirely a flemish bond except for the buttresses which are english bond and you have to remember they weren't doing flemish bond in england until the 1630s and it's hardly likely that they were doing him doing it in virginia in the 1630s and lo and behold they finally did some dendrochronology on this church and came in at 1680. so it's a very very late example of what we call gothic survival particularly when you think that it when this church was being built saint paul's cathedral bahrain was being built in london so it's backward looking architecturally but a bit forward-looking structurally with the use of flemish bond here's a close-up of flemish bond on another church in virginia dating from the 1730s using glazed headers it's a way of really decorating your church and making it decorative looking glazed headers were formed because when you stacked the bricks in the in the kill for firing the headers are closest to the heat source and they were glazed just like a piece of pottery and you can see where the glazing has spilled over onto this stretcher here and they use this byproduct of the firing decoratively by giving this checkerboard pattern now one thing to make these lovely light blue glazed headers you have to use oak to fire the kills if you use a soft wood like pine or poplar doesn't get blue glaze and because the potassium or potash in the oak has a chemical reaction with the clay to produce the blue if you use something else going to turn the headers black don't get these blue headers and notice these bricks were made you know on site in the countryside and look how uneven they are there and i'll talk more about mortar joints in a bit it's an uneven product but it gives a wonderful overall effect particularly when the sun hits these glazed headers and can make a building just sparkle like the ludwig paradise house here in williamsburg all right here's a close-up of another colonial church with a very beautiful example of glazed header flemish bond and you notice these richer color bricks on the corners here those are rub rigs and they were selected for their even color for their hardness and you rub them smooths with another brick or stone and you can do it yourself to get a very smooth surface as opposed to those granular surfaces on the main bricks and that was to give an accent at the corner and also to give you a nice straight edge on the corner as opposed to below the water table here that's done in english bond because english bond is a stronger bond some people say it's 11 stronger than flemish bond so very often you'll see english bond below the water table flemish bond above not always you can sometimes see flemish bond below the water table but rubbed brick dressings on the corner here makes a beautiful accent for a brick wall and that's precisely what was going on in england at the time a lot of these masons came over to virginia because they worked for rebuilding of london after the great fire of london and when the most of those buildings got built by the early decades of the 18th century they were just out of work so these were very skilled masons that could that came to virginia to do this work and other colonies as well so this is a house in rye england later lived in by henry james but it's precisely what we have in virginia flemish bond with glaze headers english bond below the water table well not all brickwork is all that consistent this is a one of my favorite churches this little church yocomico church dating from 1701. mason's gotten a real brick fight here one man says i'm satan said i'm going to do flemish bond with blaze header well the guy said well i don't know about that i'm going to do english bond over here well wait a minute if you go to englishman at least you could do alternating glazed headers in your english bond to kind of make you blend with my flemish but we'll know when we get over here i don't know what a little bit of it so brickwork wags call this flemish bond spell p h l e g m i s h okay so not all of it is so beautifully consistent that's what makes i think early brick work so interesting you can see what's going on with some of these guys you get the same thing with this church saint peter's church in virginia this incidentally was the parish church of martha washington she wasn't married here she was married at home the body of the church is 1700 has flemish gables just like bacon's castle or cue palace the tower is kind of baroque added later in the 1730s with good flemish bond with glazed headers these big strong pile esters and urns baroque one of these urns actually chimney which really added to the baroque flavoring to it but let's look at the main wall okay the mason traditional mason starting off well all right i'll do english bond below the water table like you're supposed to do but hey it's now the 18th century i guess i ought to be doing flemish bond all right so i'll start off with flemish bond and i'm not sure what about i don't know about this place so okay i better go back to doing something i know what i'm doing so it continues in english bond for the rest of the building now talking about glazed headers philadelphia was largely a city of brick it was the second largest city in the british empire at that time the second only to london a lot of fine brick buildings there but you see all black headers because they weren't using oak they were using maybe pine or maybe by the time this was built maybe coal big city 1773 but this is pretty standard for flemish bond in philadelphia black headers not your lovely uh light blue glazed headers in virginia by the mid-18th century they kind of stopped exposing the glazed headers they still were producing them but they just turned them around in the wall facing inward some say that's because in particular in tidewater virginia around williamsburg they were running out of oak they were having to use other things and didn't get the nice blue glazed headers so they just didn't use them so in a very fine house such as carter's grove you get its consistent even colored uh wall of wall surface here all right a couple of other really odd bonds um either it's something called dutch bond in the uk in this country we call it staggered flemish or also zipper bond very rare but what it is it's a flemish bond stretcher alternating with a header in every course but instead of the stretchers centered over a header or vice versa they're slightly pushed so that the headers kind of align in vertical stripes it's very rare but it can be interesting and a couple of examples of it this is a treasures office in virginia dating from the 1830s and you see what happens you get this kind of vertical striping in the wall over in the shenandoah valley which still we're producing glazed headers pretty late you get the striping with glazed headers and that's why sometimes over there it's called zipper bond now that wasn't a historic term because zippers weren't invented when this building was built but it gives a very interesting effect no reason why it couldn't be used on a modern building now this is a building out in kentucky dating from 1850s and it has a very unusual bond which i'm not sure has got a firm name on it well sometimes it's called monk bond in england is the only example i've seen of this in america except one possibly 17th century example in virginia but what monk bond is is a header alternating with two stretchers a header alternating with two stretchers the next course header alternating with two stretchers and so forth throughout the wall so you do get a kind of vertical aligning of headers here i think it's a very effective one and i'd like to see it used more often monk bond two stretchers to every header all header bond this is a wall built with all headers exposed no stretchers in the facade this is a thin wall actually an all header bond building would be a thicker wall and it'd be more like this this is from batty langley's pattern book on brickwork showing that you do have all headers in the surface of the wall but you make it by using a half brick alternating with a stretcher alternating with a half brick alternating with a stretcher it's trouble to make but it gives the effect of all headers very common in southern england in 18th century buildings this was this building in hampshire all header bomb this is a house in winchester on the cathedral close there all header glazed headers uh set off by the rub brick dressings around the windows here gives a very interesting effect for a building if you really want to make your brick building stand out use all glazed headers with rub brick dressings rich rub brick dressings peculiar particularly to hampshire county in england in annapolis and around annapolis on a few important houses they must have had some masons from southern england because it's the one place where you find all header bond buildings such as the bryce house you won't find it many other places in america that i know of so the facade of the bryce house is all header bond sidewall is english bond something you would not get in virginia this period we just weren't using english bond then the facades of the dependencies are in flemish bond here's a close-up of the bryce eggs all hitter bodies and quite effective batty langley and his treatise on brickwork said that heterbon is the most beautiful of brickwork bonds there were a couple of examples of all header bond in virginia one got lost in a hurricane in the 1930s the only one left only house left that uses all header bond is this house called williams ordinary in dumfries virginia probably built by maryland masons because it was dumfries was a little port town right across the bay from maryland and the wall is all header bond accented with acquire creek stone coins this is right near the choir creek quarry which provided sandstone for building both the white house and the and the national capital but this is that same stone one example of the 20th century using all header bond is this house georgian revival house by william lawrence bottomley on monument avenue in richmond very english in its style but for whatever reason mr bottomley decided he would try using header bond fine glad to have it garden wall bond or what we call american bond or also what in england they call liverpool bond it's not a decorative bond it's more a functional bond but it's a row of headers alternating with an odd number of courses of stretchers in this case three courses of scratches to a row of headers garden wall bond not very pretty interestingly it was used very early in new england this is the short house dating from 1715 the side walls are in three course what we call american bond or the english would call liverpool bond to a course of headers a functional bond one of the few 18th century houses left in downtown boston's the old corner bookstore it's done in three-course american vine but if you look up in the gable here three courses of stretchers to a row of headers three courses stretches or row of headers brickwork is very worked over it's hard to find good examples of untouched brick up north because the weather's so hard on it and the bricks spall or the mortar joints follow and they do bad pointing on it they're very often the bricks have been painted they do sand blasting on it which ruins the bricks and i won't go into that now i'll get to it later three-course american bond as far as i know was not used in virginia in the colonial period of all this is the front wall of one of the ranges of the university of virginia dating from 1817 three-course american bond three courses of stretches to a row of headers this is the university of virginia designed by thomas jefferson and that section of the facade of the student rooms is using that brick i think jefferson who was a connoisseur of good brickwork came riding down from monticello and said no you fools i didn't want three-course american bond this is the first building built at the university he said i wanted flemish bond on the facades of the of the student room so there is a sharp break there's just a short section of that three-course american then all of the rest of the facades on the loan are flemish bond not sure and then the sidewalls of the pavilions and the back walls of the student rooms are built in another functional bond not decorative at all and that's a slightly cheaper bond that's five cores of stretchers to a row of headers they didn't even bother the two of the joints here it's not pretty brickwork it's just a functional functional wall here it's facadism the fronts of the pavilions are very beautiful flemish bond which i'll show in a minute but five courses of stretchers to a row of headers all right flemish stretcher bond another variation that is three courses usually of stretchers to a row of stretcher header stretcher header as in flemish bond british call it flemish stretcher bond here we call it american bond with flemish variation because that's what it is uh you won't necessarily see it on facades it's usually on sidewalls this is a courthouse built by jeffersonian workmen the front's very fine flemish bond but the sidewall is in this three of course american bond with flemish variation you see this high tide mark here that's because these courthouses didn't have basements they have very shallow foundations and they hadn't discovered the use of a damp proof course here at that time so you get rising damp up to this point and makes all the mortar joints fall out and come along do cruddy repointed but above it the wall is in pretty good shape here it is stretch your head or stretch your head or stretch your headers and flemish then three rows of stretchers then of course a flemish alternating stretcher head or stretcher header it's a kind of cheap way of getting the appearance of flemish bone pretty nicely tool joints this is not all that precise here and you almost get vertical alignment of joints here which is not not good you need to center them here is a much more precise example of this sort of thing where the joints are centered over this the headers properly so you get stretcher header stretcher header then three rows of stretchers stretch your head or stretch your header nicely tool joints early 19th century stretcher bond this is a wall of all stretchers and no headers shown well how do you do that and make a structurally sound wall well here is an example of all stretcher bond on a little country greek revival church in virginia no headers well how do you get a proper bond this way very cleverly you use a square brick you use a whole course of square bricks and that ties it into the backing bricks but it appears just as an ordinary stretcher on the surface and they thought this was a pretty hot step because here is a house in lexington virginia with all stretcher bond on the facade and flemish bond on the secondary walls in other words they consider this higher in the hierarchy of brick bonds than flemish bond stretcher bond is very common on new brick structures but realize this is not a brick building most of these are just frame buildings and the brick is just a veneer and to use flemish bond or something else they'd have to break all the bricks in half to get the headers and they're not going to go to that expense so they just do all the stretches so don't be fooled but because this is real not real stretch or bond the brick isn't bonded at all this is just one brick thick all right we're going to look at some colonial brick details now this is a close-up of the window of the george with house dating from the 1750s in williamsburg and you see the rub brick around the jambs of the window slightly lighter color and you do that rub break because you don't you don't only want the corners to have precise edges you want a tight fit around the winded window frame itself so you use precisely shaped rubbed bricks for that and then we have something else up here which i will talk about right now so when you use the rub break around the windows and particularly in london when they have these black bricks which i'll talk about in a minute it gives a very striking effect and then you get precise bricks in these arches called gauge bricks and here's a close-up of the gauge brick what we call a jack arch or flat arch across the top of the windows at carter's grove this is very fine construction to do a gauge break is a rub brick cut to a very special shape to get all of these really parallelogram shaped bricks if you took all of these lines down to a single point they'd meet about here in the middle of the window and these are very thin joints of lime putty there's hardly any sand in it they're barely an eighth or even a sixteenth of an inch wide very precise and they're not all real joints a lot of these are just scribed joints in the surface of the brick and filled with lime putty so this may or may not be a real joint here but it's very fine craftsmanship and they are kind of a veneer uh you have just the brick uh rug brick jack arches or gauge brick jack arches as a window little but structurally reinforced behind by a timber beam here because a lot of brick a lot of weight is being forced down on the top of this window when you have a multi-story building so you have to the the the gauge brick arch wouldn't be strong enough to support all that so you have to reinforce it with a timber behind it so think of it almost just as a veneer now we got away from doing that sort of thing in virginia after the revolution this is not a very good gauge break jack arch in fact it's not gauged at all they're just ordinary bricks stuck in the best way they could because the period of apprenticeship in virginia and much of colonial america before the revolution was about five to seven years after the revolution the period of apprenticeship reduced to about two years what that meant was during that long apprenticeship system the apprentice was doing a lot of the rubbing and cutting of all the bricks the mason the master mason was just laying the bricks so after the revolution he lost a lot of that labor so they just didn't bother doing that kind of fine gauge brick work over the windows or they fit them in just like this or sometimes they've used a stone or a wooden level uh so use of fine gauge brick disappears largely out of after the revolution all right jumping back before the revolution in eastern virginia where you didn't have good building stone if you wanted fine architectural detailing such as a pediment you had to use brick so you used gauge brick especially molded and cut and sewn break to create this nice pediment that's a real work of craftsmanship that's on the public records office in williamsburg they're fairly standard on fine break buildings in the colonial period particularly on churches church churches exhibited the best masonry and you see on this virginia country church here a molded engaged brick pediment spot on which was with what was going on in london at pretty much the same time because there's not good building stone around london so a lot of the london brick buildings if they wanted nice architectural detailing like this they had to use brick so again we had good masons brought over from england in the colonial period and they could do this kind of work a supreme example of this is on this church christ church lancaster county virginia but look at all of this fine brickwork here you have molded bricks forming a pulvinated freeze then you have bricks cut to form all these little dentals and then you have a segmental arch and specially molded bricks with dentals going around this is as fine as it gets this is as good as anything that you're going to get in britain in the spirit it's undoubtedly done by british masons now you could get it carried to the extremes such as this garden niche in the privy garden of hampton court palace if you really want to go all the way you can do gage recessed art such as this and this was probably color washed uh it looks like an evidence of paint on here and the more we examine some of our colonial buildings we find that color wash was used they found evidence of color wash on this petimeter doorway here in other words the whole thing was covered with a red coating usually an iron oxide paint mixed with linseed oil to even out to cover up the joints to make it appear more as a unified architectural structure and maybe the joints would be highlighted in white as we see here because you didn't want to hide all of this fine detailing in here okay going back to the lynnhaven house a couple of things to point out even though this looks like a very simple little brick pottage this is an upscale house for its time most people were living in simple wooden shacks that have all disappeared but you find nice brick string courses here on the chimney chimney is a nice work of art it's a t-shaped chimney with a plaster band in the in the chimney just to give it accent relieving arch over the doorway here english bond throughout and you have these haunches on the chimney called weatherings and when you have bricks laid flat like this they're called tiled weatherings which is a misnomer because they're not really tiles but they were tiled in england and here is a house of about that same period in hampshire again and you see that the weatherings are covered with ceramic tiles usually roofing tiles so we just use that term for a different sort of thing sometimes and it's very rare you get what's called tumbled courses and this is instead of tiled weatherings the weatherings are cut in such a way that you get diagonal bricks here so you get a flat surface on the on the haunches themselves it's called tumble courses rare but not unique and the dutch used it a lot we go back to that dutch house you see we saw earlier you see that the gable has tumble courses in it to get a flat line even line for the gables here tumble courses now diapering that became common in tutor england and you see example of it on hampton court palace here you use glazed headers to create these diagonal patterns throughout the wall surface and it can get quite elaborate why do we call it diapering well the explanation is in the town of ipre y-p-r-e-s in belgium it was famous for making special square cut cloth which was shipped in large quantities to england in that period now the english are not genetically disposed to pronounce french properly so they're not going to say they said wipers because that's the way it's spelled y-p-r-e-s and if the cloth comes from wipers it's spelled d-apostrophe y-p-r-e-s and what is that spell diapers so that's why they called it diapering because it reminded them of that square cut cloth coming from uh developed from belgium at that time diapering was used on the continent here is a french house done with black headers a 17 early 17th century house and you get a lot of it for some reason in new jersey new jersey has some really wild brick work in it here's this nicholson house in salem but look at all the diapering patterns sometimes it can have initials sometimes it can have dates in the glazed headers this is nice flemish bond facade it probably had a pet roof here which is not this passes under restoration which has not been put back in place because there's definitely break in the flemish bond and a rare example in south carolina pretty elaborate example of diapering in this mid 18th century house or other versions of decorative use of glazed headers you get it sometimes in virginia sometimes in maryland chevroning pattern in other words parallel rows uh paralleling the gable the gable slope here uh chevron now diapering saw a resurgent and due to revival period here's a house in richmond virginia using diapering in the gable and a little bit of tumbling right there um this is good brickwork um some of the tudor revival houses exhibit exhibit very fine craftsmanship molded brick cornices very popular in late 18th century especially molded bricks instead of using a wooden cornice you use molded bricks to make a cornice this was over in the shenandoah valley and the shenandoah valley was largely settled by people coming up the valley settling in the shenandoah valley coming from pennsylvania philadelphia where there's a lot of molded brick cornices such as an alfred's alley here and that was done primarily for fire proofing um instead of using a wooden corn if you use a brick cornice because it's more fireproof and here it's got the fire company's uh shield on the house show that you paid insurance if your house caught on fire company come back and put it out if you didn't have a shield on it you were out of luck your house just burned uh another decorative feature that was prevalent particularly in the early 18th century if not the late 17th century are called sometimes houndstooth courses or mouse tooth courses those are bricks laid on a diagonal sticking out just for decoration just for decoration died out in the early 18th century and saw a revival in the late 18th century and early 19th century this is a house in richmond this is a house over in the shenandoah valley these houndstooth or dogstooth courses here's a double dog's tooth or houndstooth cornice over in the shenandoah valley decorative pattern still could be used today all right water tables remember i talked about the thickening of the foundation well in new england they laid specially molded bricks on top of the water table to throw the water away to make this more decorative to look more like a classical pedestal but they were laid vertically here's a close-up of the old south meeting house in boston molded bricks laid vertically on the water table in virginia it's just a regional thing we capped our water tables with diagonal bricks or sometimes molded bricks but always laid horizontally so above an english bond foundation flemish bond with glazed headers above rub brick corners uh carter's grove being a very fancy house had a molded water table brick brick courses to echo a classical pedestal that's more sophisticated than most after the revolution for whatever reason they decided to thicken the foundation towards the interior rather than the exterior so the wall surface goes straight down to grade nice flemish bond in the main part of the wall but the fact that this is below the or this is the main part of the foundation they thought well i guess we got to do a different break work here so they did what one two three four five course bond why they didn't carry flemish bond all the way down to great i don't know but they just didn't do it all right some word about mortar joints this is a close-up of that wall at st john's church i showed you earlier you show see how uneven the bricks are because they're made under pretty primitive conditions so you don't get nice even sides and ends of the brakes to even out the joints so i mean that means the brake joints are very irregular to even emote visually they usually scribe them with little thin lines sometimes called a struck joint sometimes called a grape vine joint they're called all different things or just an incised or scribed joints in england sometimes they're called penny joints because the masons if they didn't have a proper tool they would take the old english pennies a big penny and with a straight edge would use that to make the the little line in the mortar joint well that does two things from a distance it evens them out and it also serves to compress the joints if you push it in it just makes the mortar a little tighter so it served a couple of purposes now in virginia at least in eastern virginia we didn't have any limestone and you need lime to make mortar so to make up for that they burnt oyster shells you know this is sometimes called shell mortar they burn the shells to make the lime and in most of this shell mortar you can see little flecks of oyster shell and also because they're using oyster shell and usually a local sand which is very white gives you very white joints not tan joints like you might see elsewhere shell mortar now in a more sophisticated masonry bag you would have a jointer for making these scribed or penny joints and there is the jointer there the thing here you would line that up with one of those straight edges up here and make your uh scribed uh joint that way rather than relying on a english penny and that was done in england here's a close-up of a very sophisticated host wimpole hall by james gibbs which you see exactly that same kind of mortar joint as we saw in colonial virginia scribe joints here now after the revolution in america brick making methods got much more improved um you could get a much more even product they were the kills were improved they could burn the fire the brakes more evenly so you get a very precise brake and they got away from those scrap joints and they use what's called ribbon joints so these are joints that are very carefully tooled on top and bottom but are very flat on the surface just like a ribbon see how flat this is here on the surface don't have to do a line down the middle and this is good brickwork this is good flemish bond because when it's done right like this the vertical joints are all thinner than the horizontal joints making for a very precise beautiful product ribbon joints uh an extreme example of that is on the rotunda the university of virginia ribbon joints all of the vertical joints are considerably thinner than the horizontal joints and these are all very carefully tooled at top and bottom and you have to remember that this was all done on a circular building and jefferson said this is the finest brickwork i've ever seen um it was done by as far as we know the philadelphia masons they came down doing this right so jefferson demanded quality product okay oil break so if you wanted a very smooth surface on these early 19th century buildings you could use what's called oil brick and that's where the mold was lined with copper and instead of dusting it with sand to let the brick the green bricks slide out for firing you uh wiped it with linseed oil so you get a very smooth surface on the face of the brick and oil brick was specified for all of the facades of the pavilions at uh at the university of virginia again jefferson was a connoisseur of fine brickwork wanted to make sure he got good stuff there so here is oil brick on one of the pavilion facades you see instead of a granular surface it's very smooth surface they ought to fire the painter who splashed all this paint on here but i started to photoshop all those paint dots so that i thought i better not i just better show it as it is sometimes but you can see very nice ribbon joints throughout let's go to painted brick now i showed that earlier photograph of cue palace with its flemish bone now the thing is you can't see that flemish bond today because the building has been color washed and they found that that was an original treatment and we find more and more that that was an original treatment for many of our colonial buildings and um particularly for federal period buildings which i'll explain in a minute color washed to make the buildings just a much more overall even surface appearance so looking closely at some of our federal period buildings where the surface is protected and this is one of the pavilion facades at uva because it's protected under the portico we see that indeed it was color washed red an iron oxide paint probably mixed with linseed oil or something else sometimes they mix blood to get the color and then you can see that all the surface and the mortar joints were color washed and then the joints were all painted over with a white paint of a thin lime paint called penciling penciling meant back then not what we would call a pencil but it meant a thin brush a little thin pointed brushes where they would paint all the mortar joints that's a lot of work but they wanted their brickwork which is handmade bricks to look like the very precise bricks that you were getting in the cities so this was a way of doing it now to prove that this indeed was done this is the american builder's price book an estimator by james gallier that came out in 1836 he's talking about what each part of the brickwork laborers cost what the charges are price estimating and he says you get a price for brick fronts painted one coat and the joints drawn white per yard three cents a yard it's a lot of work for three cents but the more we look at brickwork particularly the federal theory where it's been protected either behind shutters or under a porch you see that that was indeed the treatment eventually it'll wash off but this is stretcher bond on an 1840s house and you can see it's a very even color red where the penciling has worn you can see that there was red under there meaning the whole surface was painted red and then the joints were penciled with the white joints a lot of brick was just painted to make it look like it was either stone or stucco this is the virginia governor's mansion dating from 1813 it was originally exposed red brick and we know that about 20 years later to give it a more sophisticated federal look it was painted this nice vanilla color with the trim picked out in white not at all uncommon i like painted grape washington and lee the colonnade was all red white color-wise because these buildings they all look like a unified architectural composition it really wasn't they were built at different periods and i think even out visually they have kept even up to today all painted red no penciling on this it's all just red wash very often uh houses or brick houses were painted a lighter color just to update them to give them a different effect nothing wrong with painted brick now the important point to remember is that if you're patient all paint will eventually wear off of brick just takes time you don't have to do anything to it all right tuck pointing we often use the term tuck pointing meaning that we're going to re-point the bricks no that is not tuck pointing tuck pointing traditionally is what's described in that gallier book tuck pointing says with a neat joint on new work per foot superficial four cents a yard so what tuck pointing is you do a normal mortar joint then you scribe out a little groove in all of the joints then you fill that groove with a very thin neat line of very white mortar and makes the brickwork look very precise it's a lot of work tuck pointing was fairly common in london uh london of course burnt a lot of soft coal and all the building brick buildings turned black and they were often tuck-pointed rather than cleaned off or repainted to give the appearance or to show the mortar joints and the gauge brick jack arches were sometimes clean to show that they were red to contrast with the black brick wall now most of these buildings are built out of what's called london cream-colored or yellow stock brick and next door they made the well i think it's an error to clean it all off so you've cleaned off the tuck pointing you've cleaned off the black uh soot that's been building up here you've lost the patina and i don't think it's all that attractive most of london is built out of georgia and london is built out of these yellow bricks now here's a very fine example of tuck pointing and if you look very carefully at this you can see that the mortar joints are pretty wide pretty wide here not all that even brick that's an 18th century house then it got all black with soot and they have kept that black color on here sometimes even repainting it and then tuck pointing it with this very white mortar joint inlaid in the bigger original mortar joints does this look familiar to anybody this is where you might expect really good tuck pointing it's number 10 downing street sadly you can't get near it to photograph it i took this picture about 25 years ago if you get close to it but it's a good example of tuck pointing and it's kept in very good condition there the only example of tuck pointing i've seen in america on early buildings is in charleston and you see here a form of tuck pointing here are the red mortar joints here and here you can see how this line of thin white mortar has been inlaid in the larger mortar joints they've tried some reproduction tuck pointing in charleston and as i don't think it came out very well i mean it takes real skill to do it all right press break by the mid-19th century well this is what 1850s uh the cities were making very precise breaks using brick making machines and a good example of this is this house in williamsburg a greek revival house on duke of gloucester street and it's described we have building contracts for this and it's built out of baltimore stock bricks in other words all these bricks were built in manufactured in baltimore and shipped down to williamsburg and here's a close-up of it very precise mortar joints very precise breaks called press bricks because they were done with a very stiff clay using a brick making machine which pressed the brakes by steam power into these metal molds to give you a very dense very precise brick so you could get a beautiful precise brick wall like this here are two examples in richmond of early 20th century uh well this might be late 19th century press break facades was just common kill run breaks on the sidewalls this is facadism oh so we get seven coarse american bond on the sidewall here one two three four five six seven then of course of headers one two three four five six seven and then you see how they've tried to bond the press brick facade ever so often into the mortar joints of the of the side walls here kind of a coining uh system this that didn't bother this push the um butted the press brick facade up against the common bricks of the sidewall that's my own house over here built about 1912. uh but a good press brick was on if you look carefully here uh they tinted the mortar joints uh sort of a dark red probably using a combination of iron oxide or maybe just ground brick dust and maybe mixing some lamp black in it because it ran under my front porch where it's really protected the joints are almost black anyway now very interesting brick work early 20th century brickwork i noticed on this mckinley white building down at vanderbilt university in nashville how do you describe this i think it's quite effective because i haven't found a good name for it might call it either flemish variant or english variant what it is it's a row of stretchers alternating with the row of stretcher header stretcher header stretcher header as in flemish bond so is it english with flemish variant or is it flemish with english variant it's hard to say but anyway it gives i think a very interesting effect especially when you have this blue flashing on the bricks here um nice nice pattern to the wall it'll be interesting if somebody could specify this for a while then we get into buff press bricks because everybody was burning soft coal in the late 19th and early 20th century all our cities were getting absolutely black and particularly brick buildings so they were producing a lot of this buff press brick rather than red press brick to give the buildings the look of stone and because these were very smooth hard surfaces they kind of self self-washed themselves with rain and whatnot as far as i know this this wall has never been cleaned it's on capitol square in richmond and uh rather beautiful brick with nice terracotta detailing here you have that freeze from the orexian with the anthemians in it nice terra cotta uh detailing on it press brick there's a triumph of light buff press brick on the jefferson hotel in richmond they wanted to have this clean new look make it look more like stone then another odd brick that came into the early 20th century is what we call tapestry brick this is on an apartment house right near my house oh 1920s when you look close it has all these striations that's done with the special cutter that made these striations and it's called tapestry brick because it looks sort of like the foes in a in a work of tapestry and then of course we all got carried away with colonial williamsburg restoration so there's an awful lot of replica flemish bond with glaze headers 18th century style particularly in virginia aping what was going on in colonial america flemish bond with glazed headers rub brick uh corners here this is a methodist church kind of a hyper thyroid version of brewton parish church in williamsburg um with pretty good flemish bond with glazed head or throat here it is here and it still can be done this is a wing to that same church that was done finished just four or five years ago a beautiful flemish bond with glaze headers very good gauge brick round arches around the tops of the windows here and around this window here good masonry still can be done you just need to search it out and be able to pay for it and then in williamsburg itself they did they wanted to show in the shopping area at the end of duke or gloucester street merchant square what this was on a site of a church that wasn't any good that had to be torn down they wanted to show here what merchants houses in england in that same period must have looked like so they commissioned quinlan terry to design an english-style brick building of the of the 18th mid-18th century using fine brick tailing brig detailing such as you see here in this pedimented niche up here and you have an actual dory triglyph here in specially cut molded brick you can order these details in england today and this i think is a rather handsome new uh entry to the museum of the american revolution just opened a couple of years ago showing how you can use brickwork in the pediment here in flemish bond and in a lighter color brick and pilasters and around the arcade openings here they give a very effective composition here all right i want to end up with just a few favorites of mine of fine brickwork stratford hall i think this is a very effective it's this is like a italian house it has a piano noble a high basement and they instead of coins or stone down here they've emphasized the uh basement area by using flemish bond with glazed headers and then even colored smaller bricks in the area above it with relieving arches down here and then gauge brick jack arches above and stratford has these fabulous chimney clusters here all done with molded bricks and flemish bond with laced headers and christchurch lancaster which i showed you earlier this has what we call scattered glazed headers not an overall pattern but scattered glaze just to give a sparkle to give some interest to the and texture to the wall with these wonderful molded brick doorways which you have to remember were probably color washed originally and you notice the really fine gauge break arch around the heads of the windows here this is all original sash as well or a very rich example of it is this wing of the orange red kensington palace by nicholas hawksmore using the yellow brick yellow stock brick of london accented with red brick coining around this large opening here and on the pileasters on the side really ingenious use of brick or sir john sohn's delich art museum how do you make a brick wall without any openings in it interesting well you do all of these blind arches here getting the light and shadow here a really ingenious use of brick brick structure and brick architecture or legends this is an amazing church saint jude's church in hampstead done in the early 20th century contrasting lighter brick with some glazing in it with these wonderful rich brick surrounds here on these tall windows oh an ingenious use of brick here these wonderful tall gables uh slopes on the on the roof here and look at the dome again real strong statement or the war memorial in richmond by ralph adams cram done and then finished in the 1930s took a long time to get this built a georgian campanile and you notice he's used all english cross bond here and lovely molded brick surround on these openings here now and finally the pantheon the supreme example of brick construction all done on a circle with these big relieving arches here remember on the other sides of the wall here are big niches carved in the wall so that's a thin part of that wall here so to spread the weight of this tremendous weight of this dome and these brick walls around the inlaid relieving arches in the wall surface here's one down here here they are up here an amazing bit of construction all on a circle so we went from the sublime to the ridiculous and on that note i think we need to finish so thank you very much you

Channel: ClassicistORG

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Keywords: classical, classical architecture, classicism, classicist, architecture, aesthetics, institute of classical architecture and art, calder loth, brick, brickwork, historic brickwork

Id: NUzObliy7qM

Length: 75min 57sec (4557 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021