Made by firing

Pressed Face Brick

The same clay chemistry as a common brick and an entirely different object: made under pressure instead of by hand, burned in a permanent kiln instead of a stack, sold by color from a sample, and put where it would be seen.

Which bed or works: Selected clay, cleaned of stones and lime nodules, worked stiff or nearly dry rather than wet.
How it was dressed: Pressed in a steel mold under real pressure, then burned in a permanent kiln where the heat could be held even.
How it got here: By rail from the larger works, so what a front cost here depended as much on the freight tariff as on the clay.

What pressing changes

A soft molded brick is a shape thrown into a form. A pressed brick is a shape squeezed into one. The difference sounds trivial and is not.

Pressing under load does three things at once. It expels air, so the fired body has fewer voids and takes up less water. It fills the mold completely, so every brick out of the machine is the same size to a much finer tolerance. And it takes a sharp arris off the steel, so the edges are crisp and stay crisp.

Then the burn is different too. A permanent kiln, fired continuously and drawn in sequence, holds a far more even heat than a stack plastered over with clay. Even heat means even color and even hardness, which means a thousand bricks that match.

What matching bought

A thin joint.

A wall of hand molded brick has to carry a generous mortar joint, because the units vary and the joint is what takes up the variation. A wall of pressed brick can be laid with a joint a fraction as wide. That reads, at a glance from across the street, as precision. It is the single clearest visual signal that a building was built with money, and it is entirely a consequence of tolerance in a machine.

Even color bought the second thing: a front that reads as one surface instead of as a collection of bricks. Whether that is an improvement is a matter of taste. That it cost more is not.

Bought by the thousand, chosen from a sample

Face brick was a catalogue product. It was sold by the thousand, quoted by color and finish, and chosen from small sample sets rather than by going to look at a yard. That is why a front here can be a color that no clay within a wagon haul of this city would ever produce.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it undoes an assumption people bring to old buildings: the color of a front wall is evidence about a freight tariff and a catalogue, not about the ground the building stands on. For a case where that is unmistakable, see cream brick from the lakeshore counties.

How it is used

As a facing, one unit thick, backed with common brick. A pressed brick front over a common brick body is the standard construction for a commercial building of the period, and it is why the two previous entries belong together: they are usually the same wall.

That is also why a bond pattern matters. A facing has to be tied to its backing, and the way the tying is done shows on the outside as a rhythm of brick ends among brick faces. The bond a wall is laid in is about reading that rhythm, and about the twentieth century wall where the rhythm is fake.

Close view of an even colored pressed brick wall with very thin mortar joints and sharp brick edges, flat daylight — Even color, sharp arris, a joint as thin as the bricklayer could hold. All three are the machine rather than the clay.

Made by firing, one of five ways in the catalogue