Rethinking the Brick

Bricks are among the world's oldest building materials -- the first were used as long ago as 7500 B.C. That doesn't mean, though, that bricks won't be integral to the buildings of the future. "Brickstainable," a design competition sponsored by a consortium of brick-making firms, has for the second year in a row invited architects and designers to re-imagine the humble brick. The goal is to invent the brick of the future.

BeadBricks.

The engineers who've won this year's "technical design" award have drawn on biology to rethink the brick. Jason Vollen and Kelly Winn of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created hollow, honeycomb shaped bricks that use small ridges on the outside to create "self-shading": the ridges ensure that, throughout the day, different parts of the brick absorb the sun's heat, while others cool. The air pockets inside the bricks can be sealed off, so that they serve as reservoirs of warm or cool air for winter and summer -- but they can also be left open, creating a beautiful open-brick wall with a latticework effect. These strategies are used in cactuses and termite mounds, too.

An especially beautiful proposal by Rizal Muslimin at MIT came in as a runner-up: "BeadBricks" are flat, triangular bricks that can be combined in three dimensions (rather than the usual two). Manufactured through a special process that makes them both thin and strong, the BeadBricks create structurally sound but "porous" walls and, depending on the way they're painted, incredibly intricate patterns of color and shadow: the resulting beehive-like walls, dappled with areas of color, recall the latticework you might see in a mosque. The bricks are indisputably high-tech, but, unlike regular bricks, they're also aesthetically open-ended. Regular brick walls all look the same, whether they’re located in Iraq or Indianapolis; the BeadBricks, as the Brickstainable jury notes, let local craftsman show their skills. [Via BldgBlog.]