On Bricks and the Tyranny of Lintels

I live in a fairly old neighbourhood by Toronto standards. There are houses and commercial buildings of varying vintage, but most were built between about 1890 and 1920, and almost all of them are brick.

Brick is an amazing material: it is relatively easy to work with, and its small but consistent size means that there are any number of patterns that can be achieved. Most importantly, its uniformity establishes a metric for the decorative and functional program of the masonry.

Some of the earliest archaeological remains of permanent settlement show extensive use of sun-dried, mud brick. Stronger than wood and longer-lasting, brick proved a popular and versatile material. However, its ordinariness when compared to more expensive dressed stone meant that it was often relegated to structural duties, with finer materials veneering the facades of buildings.

This trend wasn't universal, however. In England and the Netherlands, masons achieved a high level of sophistication in brick construction. Where stuccoes had previously been applied to mimic cut-stone, English and Dutch masons used the humble material to rigourous decorative effect. It has been speculated that the poor soil quality in Holland required the use of brick because it is lighter than stone and would subject the buildings to less subsidence. Indeed, many visitors to Amsterdam have noticed houses propped up with wooden posts to prevent them from toppling.

Whether or not builders were compelled by environmental conditions to use brick, it gained popularity in North America wherever clay could be easily extracted. And untethered from snobbish preferences for stone over brick, it became the material of choice in many eastern cities. It was not just its ubiquity as a natural material that recommended it for building; rather, its decorative and structural properties lent it to a wide variety of applications.

In a recent post, I wrote about the effect of concentration on design. As design and technical problems are solved increasingly by 'products' developed for and distributed in a global marketplace, skills, both mental and physical, are diminished. Take a modern brick building, for instance. Most new houses constructed with brick are built on a wooden skeleton that carries the load of the building. The brickwork is a veneer, and is more akin to tilework, as it has no structural qualities - it only needs to hold up its own weight. Older brick buildings, where the walls were double-wythed (double walls of brick), required not only significant skill in laying out the courses, but also in spanning windows and doors, holding up eaves and bay windows and tying the two wythes together. Modern brick-veneered buildings also need to span windows, but this is achieved largely through the application of a steel lintel.

Steel lintels embody the ethos of concentration, efficiency and an inevitable deskilling of the manual and creative faculties. They are everywhere in modern construction, but if you haven't seen one before it's because you're not supposed to. Steel lintels are simple steel L or I beams that allow bricks to span a window without crushing it, and are popular because they eliminate the guesswork for the mason. Before the widespread use of steel, stone or reinforced concrete lintels were sometimes used, but their unlike their steel cousins, these are highly visible elements and had to be considered as part of the visual program. In Toronto, openings were mostly spanned by a simple segmental arch. The detail is generally subtle though, as the windows themselves are almost always rectangular.

Arches are an ancient construction method that allows empty space or an opening to be spanned by distributing the weight of the walls or ceiling on either side of it rather than straight down. Depending on the how high the building was or how it was to be used, the masons would construct their window arches in varying thicknesses to assure adequate strength. Even the humblest basement window in the darkest alleyway was arched because it had to be. But if you look carefully at these out-of-the-way elements, there is a high quality to their construction because it was required: a sloppy or poorly planned arch could fail, jeopardizing the integrity of the building, to say nothing of the mason!

Most importantly though, the absence of a steel lintel as a solution to the spanning problem meant that, like the walls themselves, window headers were an opportunity for expression. For a simple rectangular window, the mason could choose a jack, cambered or segmental arch. He could alternate the colour of brick for the voussoirs (the bricks that form the arch itself), or have them project slightly from the wall. He might include a ribbon course to extend beyond the windows and articulate the floors, or use chamfered bricks to soften the opening. And because architects were rarely involved, vernacular styles could develop that reflected the particular tastes of their makers.


What I'm getting at here is that in solving a technical problem, builders had at their disposal an almost infinite number of possibilities to choose from, so long as minimal technical requirements were met. It is no surprise then, that 'detailing' is often derided as historicism, because our modern construction methodology has concentrated technical solutions into pre-fabricated elements. Any detail is necessarily an applied element, and is not an emergent property of the technic. This is why steel lintels over windows always look bare, certainly, but also quite confounding: because we can't see the lintel, our brain tells us that bricks shouldn't be laid over a window. Modern builders often get around this uneasy feeling by articulating the windows with a conceit of 'soldiered' or upright bricks to allude to an arch. This is a vestigial and empty gesture that always seems incomplete, somehow.

The city is awash with the ghosts of masons past, whose careful work has been destroyed when the windows are replaced with a pre-fab vinyl job and the original opening is bricked up. Invariably the new window is lintelled with steel, mostly because it's cheaper, and because as moderns, details perhaps don't carry the same currency for us they once did. And as the skill to create strong and lasting brick buildings is relegated to the dustbin of history and the elite ranks of heritage restoration masons, we'll have to settle for applique personalities and whatever novelty the product designers come up with.

What's in a name?

A recent conversation with an old friend got me thinking about place identity. He grew up in Brockton, which is a rough-around-the-edges West Toronto neighbourhood with a large Portuguese population. I had been spending some time in the area, taking pictures and exploring its colourful streets of short blocks, small lots and houses built right to the sidewalk.

When I mentioned my recent wanderings to my friend, his response was, "Brockton? What do you mean? I grew up in Parkdale." His house was at the upper end of the historic subdivision of Brockton, on the eponymous Brock Street that forms the north-south axis of the village and a good distance from the proverbial tracks which separate the neighbourhood from Parkdale. His response made me wonder how many residents would identify their neighbourhood by its historic name and how many would tend toward a larger attractor, like Parkdale, or Bloor West.

This is perfectly understandable. Beyond the city's printing of Village of Brockton 1888 on the major street signs, the name is not in common usage. Although Brockton was parceled out from the same land as Parkdale, it was intended to be a residential area for the working class who toiled in neighbourhood factories. As such, it lacks a grand (if faded) thoroughfare like Queen St. and many of the cultural institutions that have strengthened Parkdale's identity. Over the years, of course, Parkdale acquired quite a different reputation from its putative, genteel aspirations, but I'll save that for another post. Suffice it to say, Brockton never really established itself in the city's collective mind, nor perhaps, among its residents.

The irony is that Brockton is physically more identifiable than many other neighbourhoods. Kevin Lynch called this the 'imageability' of a place: how well it was visualized and mentally mapped. In this regard, my street, near Roncesvalles Ave. in west Parkdale, looks a lot like many other Edwardian streets in Toronto. It is very long and contains a mix of modest and more commodious middle-class houses, and in the summer the canopy of maples and oaks forms a leafy corridor. It is a lovely street, but it could be almost anywhere south of Bloor St. between Spadina Ave and High Park. Brockton, on the other hand, has small lots and truncated, crooked little streets. The railway tracks that bound its south end inform the block pattern, creating odd-shaped lots and undefined spaces. Many of the houses were built on speculation, but it often requires a keen eye to discern such developments, as the ensuing years and owners have drastically modified them. The influence of Portuguese ownership is everywhere, with angel-brick, wrought iron, stucco and tiles adding an eclectic palette absent elsewhere in Toronto. Narrow laneways crisscross the neighbourhood, and many contain small dwellings or converted industrial buildings. And because the lots are small, the houses are built close to the property line, giving the built environment a presence and providing a sense of enclosure. The human scale dominates and the resultant urban spaces are at once surprising and intimate.

So what's in a name?

A recent poll to select one for another West Toronto neighbourhood points to the fact that many people indeed take such matters seriously. Realtors have known this for a long time, and the efforts of the South Junctioners or Trianglians, or whatever they ultimately decide to call themselves should not be mistaken as a project of artificiality. On the contrary, like our own names, the moniker we choose for our place of residence is highly associative and deepens our connection to where we live. The neighbourhood might have nothing to do with Sir Isaac Brock, the hero of the War of 1812, but it has everything to do with those little lots and short blocks laid out as the Village of Brockton.

Turnips and Beets and Cabbage (oh my!)

What is a gardening post doing in a planning blog? Planners should, by definition, be excellent gardeners. The scientific approach to planning means careful consideration of placement, varieties and resource management, while those of us who are designers as well should be able to make beautiful, humane spaces. That's the theory, anyway. In reality, life gets in the way, too much or too little rain/sun/time to weed yields a poor crop and we are forced to come to terms with the fact that, just as humans are independent agents and difficult to plan for, so are the vagaries of nature and busy schedules. All that aside, the garden is a perfect tonic for the toxins of modern living. We are so accustomed to treating the seasons as a nuisance (too hot, cold, rainy, etc) that it is tempting to forget that our lives are intimately tied to seasonal processes. A trip to the produce section of the supermarket will amply illustrate our increasing detachment from seasonality in that most elemental of human requirements: our food. Availability of every vegetable and fruit imaginable at all times may fool us into thinking that we have conquered the seasons. However, the convergence of peaking oil supplies and climate change will require us to think in local terms for just about every aspect of our lives, especially food, and we owe it to ourselves to become reaquainted with and take some ownership of our sustenance.

I must admit that the distraction of the Winter Games made it very difficult to think about the spring chores, but there's nothing like a few days of sunshine and the daily reports of Grapefruit League baseball to put one's mind back on track. I dug out the seed trays last weekend and got the early vegetables started.

While we're fortunate to have a reasonably sunny balcony, the yard is about three-quarters shaded by June. This means that root vegetables that profit from early-season weak sun and shade in the hottest months do pretty well, including beets and turnips. The crop was pretty miniscule last year, but I aim to double it with careful feeding. With any luck, the pickles will last until the new year. Lettuce has been pretty successful too, and by letting a few plants go to seed, I pretty much always have a spring crop. On a friend's advice, I'm trying cabbage this year, with a plan to lay down some sauerkraut in the fall, to add to my growing roster of preserves. It's a bit bewildering to me when others ask why I would spend the time to preserve vegetables when I could more easily buy them. I might ask why a person chooses to spend their time skiing or painting-by-numbers or watching television for that matter. As any first year art student can tell you: it's the process that counts. When you add in the satisfaction and insurance of being self-sufficient, the time spent is a bargain.

On Concentration

I've been thinking a lot about concentration lately. I don't mean that in the sense of focusing one's attention to a particular enterprise, but rather in how we benefit from the accumulation of intellectual goods. It is perhaps the single-most important ability of humans that we can remember and regurgitate things we have learned. For this reason, the first human to discover that fire could be made with a flint and tinder was able to pass this information on to others. This process, which has repeated itself countless times through history, and which has been greatly abetted by writing, numeric systems, the librarian's art and humanity's relentless inquisitiveness, has brought us the wonders of the age in the form of space travel, nanotechnology and the screen from which you are reading this.

An analogy can be found in nature. The oil we depend on for so much of our livelihood is a form of highly concentrated energy that accumulated from thousands of years of plants absorbing sunlight, storing the energy in the form of sugars, and then dying. The concentration of countless tons of the stuff, formed under enormous heat and pressure in geological processes resulted in the incredibly versatile liquid we put in our gas tanks today.

We can observe this process in a less geological time-frame. Some animal proteins, which all of us form in our bodies, must be converted from plant proteins. While a selective diet can help vegetarians get all 20 essential proteins, many of us choose to eat meat. When we eat a steak or a chicken breast, we are in fact consuming a concentrated form of that animal's diet. Their bodies have already converted plant proteins into animal proteins and have concentrated it in their flesh. This is why a protein-rich diet will almost always include meat: it simply offers the most bang for the buck.

This of course brings us to another facet of concentration: the process of diminishing returns. Figures vary, but the ratio of units of grain required to produce a unit of animal protein can range from about 7:1 for steer, 3.5:1 for pork and 2:1 for chicken. When we factor in the energy requirements of raising livestock, the ratios of energy per kilogram get into the double-digits.

However, I'll save the concept of the diminishing returns of food production and energy for another post. What I'm getting at here is that we rely on concentrations of energy to run our cars, of protein to fill our bellies and of knowledge to do just about anything else. What are the implications of this? I'd like to unpack the idea of concentrated knowledge for a moment and make an important distinction.

When knowledge is passed on between two people, or culturally, there is a certain presence to that knowledge: it is possessed equally, and yet it cannot be divided. This can be observed in how we learn to throw a spiral or that Friday follows Thursday. Once you know how to do something, you take ownership of it, and may share it with others. Once you learn the name of your siblings, you also 'own' this knowledge and can also share it freely. These are skills and facts. Here is a further distinction: facts just are, while skills are a mix of facts and practice.

I will not delve too deeply into epistemology because it is outside my particular pursuit at this time. Skills, however, hold a deep fascination for me. For it is in skills that knowledge, practice and the elusive vernacular are concentrated. Yet unlike animal proteins or petrochemicals, which are akin more to 'facts' in their makeup, skills are more flexible, subtle and ultimately more human.

Much has been written about the deskilling of the modern, western human. What we lack in skill, we have made up for in specialization. By focusing on a single task within a large, globally scaled organism, we earn monetary rewards which allow us to purchase products; these products, in turn, replace skills. Now, before I am accused of being a soft-handed academic, I should fully disclose that I spent eight years as a traditionally trained cabinetmaker. My skill-set left me woefully unprepared for the reality of the modern cabinetmaking profession: while I struggled to build frame-and-panel casework with handmade doors and hand-applied finishes, the client wanted everything cheaper, faster, and was willing to sacrifice quality to get it. My salvation: premade products that made the job easier, if less flexible. Doors were cheaper if you bought the standard sizes, and would come pre-finished. It was more profitable to farm out the installation to someone else, even if it meant sacrificing control. While any tradesperson can sympathize with this, we make similar compromises every day.

Processed meals instead of home-cooked ones. Replacing clothes instead of repairing them, or making our own, for that matter. Cars with engines that are unfathomable and unrepairable by anyone but the specialist. And 'design' that has become modular, or at the very least, an act of cutting and pasting ready-made products together. By relying on the concentrated knowledge in the form of products, (combustion engines, metallurgy, food processing, etc. etc) we are sacrificing our ownership of that fact or those skills. The concentrated intellectual input of three thousand years of mathematics may have resulted in my computer being able to surf the net, but I had no part in building its chipset or assembling its motherboard. Moreover, the people who did those things were divorced from the knowledge it took to design them. The knowledge is proprietary, the means of production and the act of production are severed (to riff on Marx), and one's only claim to any real ownership of it is strictly monetary.

Like the energy of thousands of years of sunlight contained in a single drop of oil, we certainly benefit from the intellectual concentration found in all the products we can buy. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. Neither am I a historical sentimentalist, pining for a return to the horse and buggy. My point is that this concentration of skills into consumer goods, despite the purported range of choice it gives us, actually diminishes our choices. The sameness in suburban development, teenage fashions or the operating system for your computer all illustrate this phenomenon. John Steinbeck commented on the decline of the colloquial in 1960s America, a product of the ubiquitous television and radio. What we are witnessing today is a decline in vernacular design. By solving technical or style problems with products, with concentrations of embodied knowledge, we not only reduce design as an enterprise, but we ultimately diminish what it means to be human.

The Best Laid Plans

I am a planner. At least that's the plan... I am finishing up the first of two years in graduate studies to learn the (not so) gentle art of urban planning. The very term conjures up for many people all the wretched excess of the welfare state: massive housing projects and slum clearances; or maybe the endless splatter of low-rise anonymia, isolation and segregation. Indeed, we spend much of our time dissecting the follies of history and self-diagnosing as a profession. We attempt, vainly perhaps, to answer why we don't build great cities anymore, and why we knowingly ingest poison time and again, even as we rail against it. It's not all doom and gloom, of course. The profession is on the cutting edge of sustainable design and progressive thinking, and it seems to attract people who want more than a fat paycheck in a career. In fact, there has probably not been a more exciting or critical time to be engaged in the art of city-building since Hausmann razed Paris. For it is in the cities, and how we manage them, that the bigger challenges of climate change, resource scarcity and social equity must be met.

This blog is not about planning. It is about understanding how we interact with the physical world and how it interacts with us. To do this, we must scratch below the surface. We need to look, to see, and to recognize the difference. Most of all, we must never, ever stop learning.