A making group

Made by Firing

Molded from clay and burned, so the color of the finished thing is a record of the burn and sometimes of nothing else. The largest group in this catalogue, and the one where the same raw material produced the cheapest wall in town and the most expensive front.

One material, three prices

All three entries in this group are clay that has been shaped and heated. Everything separating them happens either before the kiln or inside it.

Before the kiln: whether the clay was taken as it came out of the ground or cleaned and selected, and whether the shape was thrown into a wooden form by hand or squeezed into a steel one under pressure.

Inside the kiln: whether the heat was even. A temporary stack cannot hold an even heat and produces a range from fused to barely cooked. A permanent kiln, drawn in sequence, can, and its product matches.

That is the entire difference between a rear wall nobody looks at and a front somebody paid for.

The one chemistry worth knowing

Iron makes brick red. In an oxidizing burn, iron compounds deepen from pale through red to dark plum as the temperature climbs, so within a single clay the color tracks the fire.

Across different clays it tracks nothing. A clay full of finely ground limestone will fire pale however hard it is pushed, because the lime locks the iron into light compounds instead of leaving it free to redden. That is why one entry in this group is cream colored out of a clay that ought to be red.

So the rule is narrow and it is the most useful thing on this page: color compares bricks from one source and says nothing about two.

What the group is not about

It teaches no method for looking at a building and gives a reader no procedure to follow in front of one. Each entry describes an object: what it is, how it was made, what it cost to move, and where it ended up. Whether a particular wall is what it appears to be is a question this publication answers with the word unknown, because the answer lives in a drawing or an opening rather than in a photograph.

The three entries

Made by firingCommon brick, and the back wallThe cheapest fired unit in town, soft molded from clay dug within a wagon haul, and the whole reason a rear wall is a different color from a front.Made by firingPressed face brickA harder, truer, dearer brick bought for the one wall the street could see, priced by the thousand and chosen from a card.

Made by firingCream brick from the lakeshore countiesA pale brick out of a clay that ought to burn red, and the chemistry that gave a whole region walls the wrong color for their own ground.