Project Baltia magazine n37 brick

mention the current contradiction of being able to perfect a
vaccine overnight while remaining incapable of distributing it
sufficiently widely. In this respect the historical failure of the
Russian Revolution to achieve a universally valid worldwide
socialist democracy (beginning with the Bolshevik repression
of the Kronstadt soviets) is a tragedy of unparalleled dimensions.
As Peter Buchanan has suggested in his Ten Shades of
Green: Architecture and the Natural World, written at the start
of the new millennium (see p. 628 in the 5th edition of my
Modern Architecture: a Critical History, published in 2020),
wood is the material with the least embodied energy and brick
is the second, using four times the energy in wood, while aluminum
comes top at 126 times the energy content of wood.
Buchanan writes: ‘A building with a high proportion of aluminum
components can hardly be considered green when considered
from the perspective of life-cycle costing, no matter
how energy-efficient it might be.’ We might add that sustainable
forestry at the interface between nature and culture is
not only a renewable resource but also an absorber of carbon
dioxide. From which it follows that human beings would
be well advised to join government-sponsored reforestation
programmes on a massive scale. As far as architecture is concerned,
we are increasingly capable of designing multi-storey
fireproof timber structures irrespective of the ultimate height.
Recent studies show that cultivation of the interface between
architecture and natural resources is key to creating a habitable
future. Above all, notwithstanding the apocalyptic invention
and proliferation of consumerist automobiles at the expense
of public transit (most notably in the US, which has yet
to build a single mile of high-speed railway), we need to restrict
ourselves to settling land at an evenly distributed, much
higher density.
THE LIBIDINOUS DRIVE TOWARDS ACHIEVING
AN EVER MORE EXPRESSIVE ORIGINALITY AS AN
END IN ITSELF HAS BECOME A REDUCTIVE ABSURDITY
Although certain traditional building skills are becoming
less available, it is significant that the two materials
with the least embodied energy are taken fairly directly from
the surface of the earth. As the Swiss architect Mario Botta
demonstrated in his San Francisco Museum, large panels
of precast concrete may be readily combined with stackbonded
brickwork with wired bricks being precisely set into
the mould prior to casting. Much the same effect may be
achieved with ceramic tiles or terracotta. Renzo Piano’s revival
of terracotta in this regard is particularly compelling
(see, for example, his rue de Meaux apartments in Paris).
When it comes to framed construction in wood, CLT timber
is already established as a viable material for building fireproof
multistorey apartments (see recent work by LAN architects
in Paris). The weathering of the wood frame may
be taken care of by pressure creosoting and/or tarring the
frame, techniques long since developed in Scandinavia. After
my take on critical regionalism in 1983, I sensed that,
apart from the primary responsibility of developing the programme
so as to accommodate what Hannah Arendt characterized
as ‘the space of appearance’, the relative autonomy
of architecture as a material culture could only be objectively
maintained through the articulation of the joint and also, on
occasion, of the ‘disjoint’. These premonitions, so to speak,
led me to write Studies in Tectonic Culture, which was published
in 1995.
Notes:
1. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance’, The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on
Postmodern Culture (1983), edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, Seattle.
2. Project Baltia, 2019, nos. 2–3 (34).
3. Anni Vartola, ‘Helsinki: cool school post mortem’, Project Baltia,
no. 31 (2018), pp. 108–109.
4. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture. The Poetics
of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.
Ed. by John Cava, MIT press, 2001.
BRICK AND ITS MEANINGS
DEATH AS A RESULT OF A BLOW FROM
A PLINFA WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE
SUBLIME THAN DEATH BY KIRPICH
text: Aleksandr Stepanov
graphic: Dmittriy Mukhin
Looking from the pavement of 2 nd line, Vasilievsky Island at
house 9, which was designed by Viktor Shreter and Ierononim
Kitner for Vilgelm Shtraus, a Petersburg merchant of the
First Guild, hereditary honourable citizen, and Lutheran, the
sense I get is of reliability. This is, in general, the main feeling
conveyed by the brick facades of private houses in old St Petersburg.
What’s important here is not physical strength. The
Marble Palace and the Winter Palace are built to last. However,
when I look at the Marble Palace, I don’t believe that its
walls are stone all the way through, and, when I look at the
Winter Palace, I know that underneath the plaster is brick.
The reliability of house 9 is not physical but reputational.
This house is like an honest word which you cannot help
believing.
A facade clad with marble or granite seems to be made
from dressed blocks that cannot be lifted by a mason. If
rusticated, the façade gains in importance. If polished, its
coldness repels. A plastered façade seems a monolithic
surface with openings for windows and projecting pieces of
decoration. Such facades often also go in for bodybuilding
when they imitate rusticated masonry. Glazed facades pretend
that they are not really there. All these facades want
to seem something different from what they actually are. It
is precisely against the background of this kind of artistic
performance that the honesty of the brick facade becomes
especially valuable.
People will tell me that a concrete facade is also honest.
True. But concrete has no structure or dimensions. It is not
comparable with the human body: the amount of concrete
poured depends precisely on the volume of the formwork
that has been created.
A brick facade, on the other hand, is handwork on a
small scale. Each brick is a human-scale unit with specific
dimensions and weight. Each brick is precisely laid in
place. The bricklayers died long ago, but they left warm
traces of their movements – traces that preserve the memory
of being fired in the kiln, what Charles Peirce has called
‘indices’. The surface of the brick has a simple tectonics:
you can see what is pressing on what. The protuberance
of the joins between the bricks – which ‘our bricklayers’,
Shreter wrote with pleasure, learnt while building house
9, 1 – expresses the pressure of the top rows of bricks on
the lower rows. The joins form a grid.
My attitude to brick is far from indifferent. When I was
in ninth class in school, after lessons we decided to see
which of us 15-year-old louts was best at hitting the classroom
board with a cloth. We were supposed to be battering
the board to pieces – through to the wall on the other side.
I was unable to conceive that this wall could be of stone
or plastered. Of course, it was brick, with a dense grid of
joins! I drew it right across the board – full-size brickwork
(the piece of chalk was the same thickness as the join)
with, in the middle, a jagged hole at which we aimed. (What
would Dr Freud have said? At the time we had not even
heard of him.)
In the evenings, hanging out on the streets, we sang
‘Bricklayers’. At home I had a songbook from 1924; we used
it to learn the song. I liked belting out: ‘People coarsened,
became angry/ And ripped apart the disused factory/ screw
by screw, brick by brick.’ The factory in the song is made
of brick, and the affectionate ‘brick by brick’ gripped my
heart.
The proletariat’s weapon is the cobblestone. But whose
instrument is the brick? ‘A brick on the head’ is an allegory
for the finger of Fate. I was a student at the architecture
school LISI, when, as I was turning from Admiralteysky
prospekt onto Nevsky, a brick broke off from the pseudostone
First Private Commercial Bank and crashed to the
ground just a step away from me, smashing to smithereens
against the asphalt.
Bricks have been a tool of Fate in the case of people far
more significant than me. In 1570 Tsar Ivan the Terrible visited
Vologda, which he had taken a fancy to as a prospective
new capital. The Vologda chronicles tell us that when
he entered the Cathedral of St Sofia, which he had only just
been erected at his behest (but not yet decorated), ‘something
came away from the vaulting and fell, harming the
sovereign’s head’. Ivan immediately left the city and never
set foot in it again. Construction of the cathedral was completed
after his death. A folk song relates the incident in
greater detail: ‘How a blunt red plinfa / Fell from the arch /
Fell on his head / On his poor unruly head.’ 2
Plinfa was the precursor of brick: a slim, wide slab to
which Russian masons were introduced by the Byzantines.
Plinfa is a Greek word. Kirpich, the word for brick which entered
the Russian language in the 14 th century, was initially
a synonym of plinfa but then gradually expelled it not
merely from the Russian lexicon but also from construction
practice. Brick, though, was likewise a newcomer, only
not from the south but from the east. It is a Tatar or, more
broadly, Turkic word. 3 The lexical replacement of plinfa
with kirpich reflected not merely changes in construction
technology but also a re-orientation with regard to the surrounding
world: Kiev’s mentor is Constantinople; Moscow’s
is the Golden Horde. Remember Bolshaya and Malaya Ordynka
in Moscow?
In the Sofia First Chronicle, which dates to c. 1470, the
word kirpich occurs frequently. So when, 100 years later,
Ivan the Terrible was struck on the head, it was most likely
with a kirpich. The folk song probably turned kirpich into
plinfa since it would have been improper to give the role of
instrument of fate (or Sophia, divine wisdom?) to a stone
named after the ancestors of the Kazan khanate (which by
this time had already been thrown off). Death as a result
of a blow from a plinfa would have been more sublime than
death by kirpich.
But what meanings does brick have in English? The English
started using the word brick at the beginning of the
15 th century. Prior to that, they used the Old-French word
briche, which they got from the Normans – who also used
it, incidentally, to mean a catapult for hurling stones. However,
it wasn’t the Normans themselves who came up with
briche. The latter is a word that evidently has its roots in
ancient forebears of the Middle Dutch bricke, which signified
everything that could be called a fragment, a brokenoff
piece. The root of these words is the same as the root
of the English verb ‘break’. 4 This is strange since the technique
for making bricks consists of shaping, not break-
Aleksandr Stepanov
is an architect, art
and architecture
historian,
specializing on the
Rennaisance and
modern architecture
28 brick
29 brick