Brick: A World History (guardian review article) by James WP Campbell and Will Pryce 320pp, Thames & Hudson, £39.95 Architecture emerged from the first self-conscious shaping of temples and palaces some five or six thousand years ago, or, as the 20th-century German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe put it, "when two bricks were put together well". Bricks were made from as early as 10000BC, 10000BC, but being of the muddy sort, these crumbled in i n the fiercest heat and all but melted like chocolate in time of flood. A phenomenon at odds with this mire of early building, architecture was an expression of permanence and artistry. ar tistry. Solid materials were needed to create the first earth-defying ziggurats and pyramids: only when bricks were first fired, around 3500BC, becoming as hard as stone in the process, did what we recognise as architecture emerge from Mesopotamia. The unyielding quality of fired bricks is real enough. A few months before the American and British invasion of Iraq, I brushed away away burning desert sands in the deep south of the country to uncover the brick steps of the ziggurat at Eridu, the temple of what is i s possibly the world's first city. It was, for me, a profound moment. I was standing on the building blocks of the first steps in the adventure of architecture. Invaders Invaders of this much fought-over fought-over part of the world have come and gone, and will come and go again - Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Persians, Macedonians, Arabs, Mongols, Parthians, Turcomen, Turcomen, the British and the Americans today - yet this hard evidence of the first civilisation remains. As hard as the day these bricks were baked. On my way from Nassiriya to the mythical site of the Garden of Eden, I visited a brick works in the open desert. A gang of men sweated to feed a ravenous oven. Bricks shaped in the open air were carried into this inferno by a stoic donkey. Smoke escaped through tall, scorched brick chimneys. The Garden of Eden might have come and fallen, yet this scene had remained all but unchanged for 5,000 years. Naturally, Naturally, I turned hungrily through the pages of Brick: A World History. This mighty tome is a handsome pictorial history of a building material that is not so humble after all. Will Pryce's impeccable photographs are the bricks, while James Campbell's lucid and accurate text is the mortar and pointing holding them together in fine fashion. It is a shame that this otherwise magnificent book recycles a common misconception in its blurb. "Until recently," it says, "brick was the Cinderella of the t he building industry. Browbeaten by the doctrines of modernism, architects and critics put their faith in steel, concrete and glass, forgetting the spectacular achievements achievements of brick bri ck throughout its long history, history, not to mention its practical advantages." This is untrue. Van der Rohe himself, for all his love of steel, was equally at home building in brick, while many of the finest, self-consciously
"modern" buildings of the past 50 or 60 years are celebrations of this venerable material. Brick connects architects to the roots of architecture. It has never gone away, nor, as Campbell is at pains to point out, has it ever been a second-rate substitute for stone or marble. Fortunately, Campbell's text proves to counter the blurb's assertion. He demonstrates how, far from discarding brick, modern architects, including those as inventive as Renzo Piano, who with Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Centre - all steel ducts and iron trusses have breathed fresh life into baked mud. On the way from the first fired bricks to the latest work by Piano and his contemporaries, Campbell and Pryce take us on a well-paced tour of the finest brick buildings built over the centuries and around the world. They take us up on to Roman aqueducts, down into Victorian brick sewers and up again to the peaks of Italian Renaissance towers, the crowns of Islamic domes. We learn just how valuable the first fired bricks were. Records from the third dynasty of Ur (2111-2003BC) tell how a piece of silver could buy 14,400 mud bricks or just 504 fired bricks. The Sumerians used the word "sig" to denote a brick, a building, a city and the god of building. So next time someone calls you a "brick", you walk with gods. The Babylonians gave us the painterly glazed brick. The Romans stretched rows of bricks for miles, not far off 50 in the case of the Aqua Claudia, built in the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. The emperor Justinian claimed to have "outdone Solomon" when he first saw the newly completed Church of Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople (Istanbul); its gravity-defying dome is built of down-to-earth brick. Islamic culture gave us such nearly forgotten masterpieces as the 10th-century Tomb of the Samanids at Bukhara in Uzbekistan, where the bricks appear to be woven together. Buried by desert sands for centuries, the tomb was uncovered by the Soviet archaeologist Shishkin in 1934. Legend has it that when the Mongols razed this corner of the world in 1220, they were so taken aback by the beauty of the building that they spared it. Our guides lead us on through the pleasures of fine twisted, rubbed and gauged brickwork, characteristic of English building at its Tudor and Georgian best, to the hard, if colourful, machine-made bricks of the 19th century. And so to the riotous mixing of blue, yellow and red bricks in dazzling buildings in towns with no tradition of brick construction. Railways, together with the colour theories of, among others, John Ruskin, led to such glorious brick extravaganzas as William Butterfield's Keble College, all promiscuous "zig-zags" and "diapers", in Victorian Oxford. And, just before we enter the modern world, we stop to visit the last of the truly gigantic all-brick buildings this side of 20th-century power stations. The Monadnock Building in Chicago (Burnham and Root, 1889-91) is truly awe-inspiring: 16
floors of solid brick, this titanic construction sank 20 inches below the sidewalk before it settled. You step down to enter it today. A brick, though, remains a building block on the most human scale. You can shape bricks, and hold them, and architectural history, in the palm of your hand. With just a little training, you could build a wall of your own, a whole house. And yet, as Campbell's glossary implies, the earthiness of the brick is matched by an unexpected lightness of being. And sheer delight. Here are earthy references to "bonding", "bed joints" and "box moulds"; you will find "faïence", "french arch" and "flying bond", to say nothing of the "Queen closer", "quoin" and "Quetta Bond". Put together well, these are the stuff of imaginative architecture and a well-laid book.
