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.