A brick like a lover

Imagine. What if there exists a whole city where each and every, big and small, private and public, built-form is made of brick. Imagine. Instead we have a whole brick expressionism which swept us off in late 1920s with a major hangover of it even today. All of us know some of the major iconic buildings made of bricks. There are lot of lovers , of bricks. Yet, each building is interesting as well as boring on entirely contradictory tangents. We often mistake the brick as an element of ‘Modernism’ . It was neither modern as an element, nor as a material. Modernism is a style. Brick has extremities in the way of how it is looked upon. Sometimes very earthy and vernacular and incomplete; and sometimes intentional.

As Mies puts it,

“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”

Yes, and the frenzy begins with scale and style. Bricks like arches. They put qualities of a good orator in a built-form. Brick is an element of grandeur as well as the most basic element a house can have. It is the ‘making’ as well as the ‘made’. It is the ‘participant’ as well as the ‘spectator’. Brick is the Place as well as the Space. The beauty of a brick is that it gets to be. All by itself and what it does.

Buildings, too, are children of the Earth and Sun, as rightly said by Frank Lloyd Wright.

A brick will enhance and encourage the synchronicity between a physical space and the quality of a space. One is the physical literal experience while other is a metaphysical experience. A space is felt when there is clarity on these two planes of experience.

” Even a brick wants to be something.”- Louis Kahn.