Understanding Bricks: Fundamentals

About this course.

A brick is a small, standardised building unit, sized to be laid by hand in one hand while the other holds the trowel, and bonded with mortar into walls and other masonry. That simple definition captures the two things that have made the brick one of the most successful building products ever devised: it is modular, so any number of bricks can be combined to build almost any wall, and it is human-scaled, so a single worker can build with it without lifting equipment. Bricks have been made and used for thousands of years, and they remain central to Australian residential and commercial construction because they combine durability, fire resistance, appearance and availability in a form that trades understand intimately.

The essence of a brick is that it is a unit in a larger system called masonry. Masonry is the craft and the structure formed when individual units are bedded in mortar and stacked in overlapping patterns so that the joints do not line up. The overlap, or bond, spreads loads across the wall and stops it behaving as a stack of separate columns. So while this course is about bricks, a brick almost never acts alone: its behaviour in a building is the behaviour of the masonry it forms, together with the mortar, any reinforcement, the footing beneath it and the way the wall is tied, supported and detailed. Keeping the unit and the assembly in mind at the same time is the beginning of understanding brickwork.