Open Source Curriculum

About the Topic

By tracking the lifespan of a brick – one of architectural history’s most durable building materials – we can also track how hegemonic systems are produced and reproduced over time. Consider two examples from the history of American building:

Euro-American settlers moving westward across North America often plotted their settlements directly overtop Indigenous earthen mounds. Written accounts tell of the settlers’ intention to build their courthouses, jails, and schools out of bricks to ensure that such structures would survive multiple generations.

In 1978, the New York Times reported on “great neatly stacked piles of weathered red bricks stand[ing] by the railroad tracks that hug the Mississippi River.” The bricks had been salvaged from 19th century manufacturing sites in St. Louis – once proclaimed a Gateway to the West – and were being shipped to “places like Savannah to restore historic buildings and to Texas to make patios for the new houses springing up around Houston.”

As part of the series about “Architectural Ceramics,” this State of Ceramics will take up the brick to question how claims to place come to belong to some people but not others, and how “boom-and-bust” economies leave their mark in the built environment. To do this, we’ll focus on the dynamic qualities of bricks used in the history of American building, asking how they have settled, shifted, and otherwise moved within fluctuating geographies produced by unstable social valuations. 

What is it about the affordances of brick – its materiality, its production, its form – that worked so well to emplace America’s violent myths and spatial imaginaries? How might those of us who work with ceramic objects take up the same old brick without reifying the same old structures? Are other futures made possible by the brick we can hold in our hands? In this session, we will grasp at some dynamic bricks to ask where they’ve been and imagine where else they might go.