Architectural Brick Workshop

A collaboration between architects, educators, students, and manufacturers

Organized by WRNS Studio, Pacific Clay Brick, and Cal Poly College of Architecture & Environmental Design, the Architectural Brick Workshop brought together educators, students, architects, and manufacturers to investigate new possibilities with architectural brick. Students examined the relationship between craft, fabrication, and the calibration of unique visual and textural effects at multiple scales.

Organized as a series of charrettes at Pacific Clay’s Southern California Production Facility and Cal Poly’s campus, the workshop immersed teams in hands-on experimentation with the tools and processes of brickmaking.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Ryan Gobuty, Ben Mickus, Mila Kim, Josh Higgins, Mark Cabrinha,
Celso Rojas

The prompts: exploring different scales and uses

Brick has many elemental qualities; earth, water, fire and air are all intimately involved in its creation.  Likewise, the workshop encouraged elemental thinking about design, using clay brick as a medium.  

Students were given a series of prompts—like design at the scale of a brick and at the scale of a wall—to explore through conceptual sketches, prototype formwork, mock-up scale installations, and design drawings.

Participants were introduced to color and texture, uniformity and variegation, pattern, proportion and scale of an individual brick and a field of assembled bricks. Topics of structure, aperture, planarity and distortion were discussed in the context of human scale and placemaking.

During one week at Cal Poly, each group designed and built a custom formwork element, as part of a conceptual brick wall design. Then over 100 students boarded charter buses bound for the Pacific Clay Plant.

The groups arrived at Pacific Clay with their formwork creations in hand, ready to spend the day learning about the process of brick-making and going to work making some custom bricks of their own.

Pacific Clay plant visit

Pacific Clay was established in 1892, and has been in continuous operation for over 130 Years.  Today, Pacific Clay Products is a leader and innovator in the clay brick manufacturing industry.

In the late 1800’s, the discovery of high quality clay and coal deposits near Alberhill, California led industrialists to this area in pursuit of raw materials for numerous fired ceramic products. This clay is geologically unique in that both sedimentary (lake, stream, or ocean deposits) and metamorphic (altered in place) clays are present. This allows for the necessary blending to make many different ceramic products. There is no other deposit of clay like this in the world. These clays are over 200 million years old! The Alberhill area has supplied clay for fine pottery, clay sewer pipe, face brick, brick pavers, roofing tile, clay pots, firebrick, lignite coal, and modeling clay. 

The action-packed 5-hour visit served two purposes for the workshop. First, the students were given an in-depth tour of the facility, with each step in the brick-making process explained, and often demonstrated, by the Pacific Clay team. Second, the student teams gathered at a row of stainless steel work tables, and using their own formwork along with a variety of specialized tools provided by Pacific Clay, made their bespoke bricks. 

Presentation: crafting ideas into reality

In the weeks following the brick making session, Pacific Clay’s team dried and fired the prototype bricks while the students documented their brick design with a series of drawings and diagrams. Integrated into the second-year architectural technology curriculum, the workshop challenged student teams to demonstrate how their prototype bricks could be used in distinct architectural wall applications. 

Each team illustrated their concepts with initial sketches and individual brick module shapes augmented by plans, sections, elevations, and axonometric diagrams, exploring how their custom brick modules could translate into real-world construction.

When the students received the final products they had created themselves, the thrill on their faces was unforgettable! The bricks were assembled and arranged together with the presentation drawings, and the next few hours were spent talking about design possibilities with the Cal Poly faculty, along with the WRNS Studio and Pacific Clay teams.

See more of the students’ work here.

Brick design in practice: Elco Yards, Redwood City, CA

At WRNS, practice and academia are a virtuous cycle. We initiated the Architectural Brick Workshop following years of collaboration with Pacific Clay, most recently on our work together at Elco Yards, where brick features prominently. Read more about this project here.