10 June 2016

Brick


Brick

Brick, edited by William Hall, is a survey of over 150 brick buildings, from a 4,000-year-old ziggurat in Iraq to a twenty-first century structure built by a robotic arm. Published by Phaidon, it follows exactly the same format as Hall’s earlier Concrete: full-page photographs with extended captions, arranged in themed chapters.

In his introduction, Hall notes that “no illustrated books have been published on the subject for over a decade.” The last book on brick architecture, a comprehensive global history by James W.P. Campbell, was indeed written more than ten years ago (in 2003). The first international survey of brick buildings — Brickwork, by Andrew Plumridge and Wim Meulenkamp — was released a decade before that (in 1993).