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design
mag |
15
Survival
of the
Fittest
Bricks, one of our oldest and most basic
building blocks, have evolved to meet
the needs of contemporary designers
in today’s climate-challenged world.
By Gerry McLoughlin, architect and
urban designer.
The craft of mixing clay and water to make a paste
and baking it in the sun to form the most basic of
building block has been with us for over 75 centuries.
The earliest known bricks were made before 7500BC
in the Tigris Valley, now Syria.The first sun-dried bricks
were made in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in about
4000BC.The earliest fired bricks were discovered in
the Western Zhou ruins in China, and are estimated to
date from 1000BC.
The Romans fired bricks using mobile kilns, thus
introducing the technology throughout their empire.
They were often stamped with the mark of the legion
supervising their production.The use of bricks in
southern and western Germany, for example, can be
traced back to traditions described by the Roman
architect Vitruvius.
To consider the earliest known brick is over three times
older than our modern civilization certainly tells a story
of a very basic need for secure shelter and protection.
Drawing from materials immediately available, earth,
sun and water, to make the most primitive building
block, the desire to create shelter is as old as mankind.
In fact in primitive languages the first word is often an
expression of ‘I’ and the second is ‘shelter’.