Solid brick, facade brick, hollow brick, fireproof brick... Orange, white, ocher, black...
Used in construction for centuries, and still used today, they are indispensable details of buildings.
Some cities can boast of serious buildings whose exteriors are decorated with brick, for example Amsterdam, everywhere you look, you see brick 🙂
They are all around us, built into the walls everywhere we turn.
I am not in a position this week to walk to some medieval building, fortification or fortress, in order to tell you a story with a picture of a brick that is several centuries old (as I did a month ago, during a visit to Kalemegdan, which is entirely built of stone blocks and bricks), so I will post one photo that did not end up in that post.
As I already mentioned, everywhere I go I can see walls made of bricks of various colors.
This white facade brick is on my balcony, and these red ones are on the kindergarten building in my neighborhood.
An example of a hollow brick is this one, where a part of the brick is broken from the impact and you can clearly see the particles that make up the hollow interior of the brick.
Considering that something is constantly being built and rebuilt, you can see bricks in the streets...
@Friendlymoose mentioned a song about bricks (are you really that old to have heard it when it came out?)
Although the Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the wall" hides a deep interpretation of individuality and freedom, a criticism of the wrong, repressive education that stifles the creativity of young people and tries to make them uniform, when I mention "Another Brick" I remember several anecdotes from long ago.
I was on military service at the beginning of the new millennium, 22 years ago.
Location Petrovaradin, near Novi Sad.
One military officer wanted to build a wall in the workshop where we had work activities.
In order to prepare the material, he took us to the area of the Petrovaradin fortress, where we took old bricks from a ruined wall.
That wall was originally part of the fortifications of the fortress from the time of the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa, the ruler who oversaw most of the construction of the fortress for 40 years in the 18th century.
Later demolished, the remains of that wall stood as a hindrance to the passage of pedestrians, so we did a useful thing, removed the demolished bricks from the path and installed them in the new wall in the fortress circle.
I still remember those bricks, hard-baked, large-format, with the stamp MT (Maria Theresa). Just as I remember the kilometers we walked while carrying those very heavy bricks from one end of the fortress to the other.
"Another brick", meant that I had to go two kilometers to get it...
And the second anecdote is related to the reconstruction of our cottage, when we added the attic to create functional rooms.
We found a craftsman, a mason, who calculated the necessary material according to our wishes. A full truckload of sand, blocks, ceiling mounts, rebar and two pallets of bricks (1000 pieces).
When I asked him if that would be enough, he said "Absolutely".
I bought the materials, paid a lot for the transportation and unloading from the builder's warehouse to the cottage, paid manual workers to lift all those bricks to the attic, and then I thought I had prepared everything I needed.
I could come down from the attic and leave the matter in the hands of the mason.
Brick by brick, the mason quickly spent them.
At one point, I heard from the attic: "I need more bricks".
I went up to the attic and saw a half-finished wall and another hundred pieces on the pallet next to it.
"How much more do you need?" I asked him.
"And another 700 pieces".
"700 pieces? Are you crazy, how did you calculate that?"
He told me then: "If I had told you that you needed 2,000 bricks, you would never have started building the attic, and this is how you entered the business and now there is no going back."
"How you mine 2000, when you told me that you need another 700, you have 100 pieces on the pallet, and with those 1000, that's 1800. Not 2000."
"Okay. I need another 1000".
I figured he was definitely crazy...
I re-organized transport and manual workers, bought three pallets of bricks (another 1500 pieces), because bricks are cheaper than transport, and when the time came for his work, I calculated for him half the cost of transport and an additional round for bricks, and paid him a reduced amount from the agreed.
He didn't protest much because he realized that I wasn't joking and that he had misled me with such a lie and put himself in a situation where he could have been beaten 🙂
So when someone mentions "Another brick", I see this extra bricks in front of my eyes.
Pictures of bricks, not exactly as a memory, but as a reminder of some situations from the past...Although this is a #POBPhotocontest, I can't really boast of some impressive photos of bricks, but today, since it's Thursday, I added some of my memories that would fit in with #ThrowbackThursday.
Thanks :-)