Architects now designing with brick

If you look around our cities there are so many beautiful historic brick buildings - churches, and warehouses with a depth of charm and character that only brick, one of the world’s oldest building materials, can create. It’s a material that’s having an international renaissance in design circles, as consumers are beginning to understand the character and design versatility brick can bring to architecture.

“If you look at European cities, they design with brick instead of build with it,” says Brickworks NZ Anna Carlton-Hurdley. But less established countries such as New Zealand and Australia are now catching on to brick’s capacity for making bold architectural statements.

Anna says this is due to several factors. Firstly, the availability of a vast range of choices of brick mean consumers aren’t left with “50 shades of tan” and secondly, brick is an ethical building product, a fact that has been overlooked in the past.

“It also has wonderful thermal qualities,” says Anna “you don’t have to paint it, it lasts for ever and it’s a natural product – it’s simply clay dug out of the ground and kiln-fired.”

The building material also speaks to consumers’ desire for hand-made and unique product.

“That’s one of the really lovely things about brick - each one tells a story, no two bricks are the same and the colour of the clay directly reflects the location from where it was unearthed.”

While Australia’s architectural landscape has always included brick due to the country’s predisposition towards termites and fires, New Zealand’s architectural vernacular has always been predisposed to timber. But the range of brick now available means the language of our buildings is beginning to change.

Brickworks NZ has access to international brick from around the world including Italy, Spain and Australia. This means consumers and designers are finally able to design with brick in line with the latest trends.

“There are two trends currently,” says Anna. There are the authentic bricks – beautiful rustic, honey or red, really slubby bricks – the ones that make you think of a classic brick. Those are our heritage bricks – the difference between the originals and ours is that our bricks meet code of compliance and warranty,” says Anna.

The other trend is for monochromatic “fashion bricks” which take in shades from white right through to black.

However, designing with brick in New Zealand is slightly different to other countries such as Australia. This is because bricks are typically used as a façade or cladding in New Zealand, rather than as a structural element. This means our bricks are manufactured to a width of 70mm (it’s 110mm in Australia).

But designers and architects are using this to their advantage, says Anna. “We’ve found as distributors there are more and more Australasian practices and projects and they have been specifying Australian bricks for New Zealand projects – they can still be used in New Zealand – it’s the look that they’re after.”

The availability of a wider range of bricks in New Zealand means the renaissance of brick is just getting started here and we’ll see more and more creative uses of brick in our architecture, says Anna.

Want to know more about designing and building with brick? Be sure to visit Brickworks NZ on ArchiPro today.