GILDED BIRDS

Daniel Pope, architect, on a London house brick.

GB Tell me why you chose this.

DP I think about brick every day of my life. I think about what the brick means to my practice and design and my outlook on material every single day. It’s beautiful to me for its simplicity. It’s the most simple thing in architecture – a piece of mud that’s been shoved in a mould. It has this incredible history that goes back to the First Century AD in London and yet it’s still holding up the entire building fabric of the city. It just has such a material honesty and I always try never to apply a material where it’s not needed, never over-decorating, always letting the material sing. It just reminds me to never decorate. 

GB Do you think we have some innate, inherited response to brick because we’ve used it for thousands of years and it makes us feel at home?

DP I think so. I think it’s also gone really badly wrong. We love our Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian brick housing in London and it’s protected. But I think now, the way it’s used in planning is so wrong. If you’re building a new development it’s a finish that you tick. You have a brick slip but you attach it to a massive stainless steel frame, which is completely bastardising the brick. It’s not the way it was intended to be used – it’s just becoming an appliqué.

GB There are so many people now who want to look like they have an exposed brick wall and they put up those brick tiles.

DP My brother did that! I couldn’t stop him! He didn’t tell me he was doing it and he’d put so much effort in so I didn’t say anything. I think people are drawn to brick, I think they feel safe with it. It’s such a charming thing. No one brick is the same.

GB Do you know where the clay came from in the brick you’re holding right now?

DP This is London clay. This most likely to be from one of the last remaining quarries out by the Thames Estuary, a beautiful part of the South East. I went to visit the factories and they’ve got huge stockpiles of clay. There’s so much of the stuff under London but we’re not building with it any more. It’s crazy. This brick has a lot of black flecks from old Victorian glass medicine bottles that they’re still finding. Glass waste used to be shipped down the river and dumped in the fields so we’re still digging it up. It helps with the firing of bricks. It’s insane that such a mundane object contains so much history. It’s designed purely for efficiency. Although it was actually designed to fit the standard dimensions of a male hand making it inherently sexist. When I started making my own bricks a few years ago I made a new shape of brick that was triangular and softly curved at each point meaning a smaller hand could easily handle them. More recently, I have developed a research project in robotic ceramics, so I’m looking at our existing housing stock. Many solid old brick houses that have been around for 200 years are draughty and leaky and not climate friendly, so we need to make them last longer. The current way of insulating uses awful petrochemical insulation, boarded in and rendered with cementitious material. The materials used are suffocating so you get damp and mould on the interior. I’m trying to develop a new system that takes brick earth and considers how to apply a new layer of brick skin to the outside of a building. So, it will completely transform the building visually but still has the material lineage of the London clay. But it’s designed to be fabricated using a 3D printer on a robotic arm so I can create bespoke bricks that hug the more ornate parts of buildings like stone carvings around windows. There can be a bespoke brick that slots around the building that allows it to last another 200 years and is carbon neutral. It preserves London clay bricks in a very healthy way.

GB Do have a favourite use of brick in the world?

DP Good question. There are maybe two. The one that started my love of brick is Alvar Aalto’s Experimental House. I just love it, it’s like looking into his brain. It’s like a sketch-book building. There’s also a church in Canada by Douglas Cardinal. I fell in love with the drawings first and he’s managed to make a brick building look like a Barber Hepworth sculpture. To turn a rigid thing into such a fluid design shows the versatility of the back.

GB Do you like aged bricks with moss and insects? Do your new bricks welcome wildlife?

DP They’re a kind of honeycomb design inside. They’re still in development but at the moment they’re an absolute dream for an insect. The bumpy, unglazed relief is a perfect place for moss to grow.

GB So is stucco the enemy to you, creating fake grandiosity?

DP I do love the grandiosity of a stucco-fronted terrace! But It’s not a design language I would subscribe to today in terms of making fake stonework! Stucco is made from lime though which is an amazing, breathable material. I’m inspired by practices like Material Cultures who are using lime based building materials in very contemporary ways. 

GB Do you find more beauty in architecture than in other art forms?

DP I think I’m drawn to things which are quite confronting and immediate. I’m drawn to landscapes and earthworks generally. Things made from the earth. There’s an artist I like at the moment called Dan Lee who paints colourful abstract landscapes that remind me of old photographs of brick fields.

GB As an architect, does function come before beauty for you?

DP The challenge to make function beautiful is much more interesting for me. I would always find an interesting way to make function beautiful.

GB Do you subscribe to classical ideas of beauty through symmetry and proportion?

DP Not really. If I was working with an existing building I’d always be sympathetic. I would never follow a rule system that imitates designs of a different era. Although I do agree that in the past architects had an insight into what’s universally pleasing to us. Looking out of my window now at a Victorian terrace, the houses are pretty pleasing to the eye and were made at a time when house-building was progressing at a good rate using brick from local quarries. So they were able to create a formula and replicate it and do mass house-building in a very beautiful way. We don’t build at that pace or volume any more, so now we get housing developments that try to replicate the proportions of Victorian or Georgian buildings but it’s done in the most awful way.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

DP My brick is beautiful because it’s honest and pure. It’s not dressed, it’s not complicated. It’s an expression of itself in its most pure form. I love craft because it’s taking a process and applying it in a new way. It can express the material in a way you’ve never seen before and push the limits of a material, but it’s still the expression of that raw material. That’s where I think beauty comes from. It’s a material expressed in its most simple form.