Rick (building)

“ At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You are all nuts. ”

“ While there is some exceedingly pleasing brickwork in New England and especially in the Connecticut Valley, brick excellence is much more common in the Middle States and the South where brick building was always more in vogue. Occasionally in New England, and very frequently farther south, a{243} goodly degree of interest was achieved by the combination of different bonds, by herring-bone panels, by projecting courses on wall faces, at cornices or about chimney tops and by diaper patterns, dates and initials wrought in blue headers on end walls and in gables. ”

“ Modern builders have greatly neglected this precaution, and the wind blowing over a high-pitched roof naturally descends on the other side, and carries the smoke down the chimney, instead of letting it float away freely with the wind.
No one who has seen the fine brick buildings of the time of Henry the Seventh can despise them. Eton College is almost entirely built of brick, excepting the chapel, which is faced with stone. In many districts the difference of expense between brick and stone is enormous. ”

“ But building roads capable of handling three hundred to four hundred miles an hour speeds was beyond the financial and engineering capabilities of individual states and nations. Thus grew the continental thruways with their four speed lanes in each direction, each a half-mile wide separated east and west and north and south by a half-mile-wide landscaped divider. ”

“ Mr. J. E. Jones will, in all probability, rebuild his brick building in the spring. This makes the seventh man who has told us he contemplated building a brick.
Messrs. Dusenbery & Co. have erected two business houses two or three lots east of where their old store stood, which will be occupied by Mr. ”

“ Many of the buildings are of logs; but there are some good brick houses, and a neat frame-church painted white, with a large clock. There are many brick-buildings going on; and the log-cabins are so placed, that they will serve for outhouses to the new brick-houses. Each cabin has a small garden to it; most of them are in good order, much more so than American gardens generally are. I understand brick-houses are built for those to whom the lot falls, without any regard to persons; with the exception of Mr. Rapp, who has a {238} large one. The tavern, stores, and a few others, are also brick. ”

“ We gave our patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems, through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was," Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this morning blew it to hell and gone. ”

“ It is a beautiful brick building, with courts at either end, the brick walls of which, connecting with the house, extend its lines with peculiar grace, and tie to the main structure the twin buildings which balance it, according to the delightful fashion of early Virginia architecture. The hexagonal brick tile of the front walk at Claymont Court, and the square stone pavement of the portico, resemble exactly those at Mount Vernon, and are said to have been imported at the same time ”

“ With no other knowledge of pisé it is only natural to condemn it because of such specimens, but under similar circumstances other better-known 82 building materials of proved excellence would also be condemned. Brickwork would just as readily be condemned if its building qualities had to be estimated by the appearance presented by a brick building which had been constructed of badly-burnt bricks laid by unskilful tradesmen on an imperfectly thought-out plan. ”

“ Nicholas at Leicester, which contains horizontal courses of brick at intervals, and arches constructed of brickwork; the curious portion of a wall of similar construction, with remains of brick arches on the one side, which indicate it to have formed part of a building, and not a mere wall as it now appears, at Wroxeter, Salop; and the polygonal tower at Dover Castle, which, notwithstanding an exterior casing of flint, and other alterations effected in the fifteenth century, still retains many visible features of its original construction of tufa bonded with bricks at intervals. ”

“ Rickman’s increasing archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties (see Chapter 10) .
Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal construction, bridge building, [155] one finds a rapid increase in the numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. ”

“ Rickman was the first to reduce chaos into order, and to shew that the age of a building can be ascertained by the construction and the details, on the principle of comparison with well-known dated examples, and he should always have the credit of being the first to establish this. ”

“ I like better the notion of letting the material of which brick walls and partitions are composed form the actual finish inside as well as outside. The floors, too, should be bare, and the beams that support them ought to be visible, and in case of a wooden house, the posts, braces and other timbers should be left in sight when the building is finished. It is a sad pity that modern modes of building, like modern manners and fashions, conceal actual construction and character, making a mask that may hide great excellence or absolute worthlessness. ”

“ Filling the spaces behind the lathing in a brick house with some fireproof and non-conducting material is a concession to usual modes of building. A more satisfactory construction still would be to build the wails of hollow bricks and with air spaces so disposed that neither wood furrings nor laths would be necessary. ”

“ Anatole made a note, “Try and buy huts.” There were stud and plaster houses with the timber framing fairly sound; the walls of these could be replastered or covered temporarily with felt. There were brick houses that a little ingenious patching would put into passable repair. There were mere broken shells that needed building up squarely before they could carry the cap of a roof. In many cases a crumpled mass of tiles and rafters would have to be removed before the actual work of reconstruction could be begun. ”

“ In fact, there is no building material so thoroughly reliable, through thick and thin, in prosperity and in adversity, as good, honest, well-burned bricks. But the ordinary brick house is double—a house within a house—a wooden frame in a brick shell. Like logs in a coal-pit, the inner house is well protected from outside attacks, but the flames, once kindled within, will run about as freely as in a wooden building, and laugh at cold water, which, however abundantly it is poured out, can never reach the heart of the fire till its destructive work is accomplished. ”

“ In a building of this nature, a factory-like look would be taken for granted and pardoned, but, on the contrary, its design is not only adapted for its function, but the building forms an important link in the architectural whole. It assumes its place quite naturally and modestly, almost unobtrusively in the natural landscape, tying the buildings in the upper terrace with the base. The tall smoke-stack is cleverly concealed within the walls of an imposing granite tower. ”

“ The nature of the material prevents our having any great projections; they would require to be supported by iron bands and set in cement, and be entirely false construction, if not dangerous, and statuary or sculpture is of course out of the question in brick. But there is nothing to prevent deeply recessed openings in windows or doorways, and many patterns might be repeated, such as pateræ or cuspings. In all old brickwork there is no attempt to conceal the nature of the material, or make it appear to do more than it{173} actually does in the building. ”

“ The northern projection, the kitchen end of the house, shows a large brick chimney built on the outside with a stone foundation. It is so high and big that it reaches far above the roof, and possibly is the first one of its kind ever shown in colonial architecture. The self-evident age of both the brick and the plaster, broken here and there, leaves no reasonable doubt to the student of the antique as to the period of its building. ”

“ Brick and tile are two of our most delightful materials; people do wrong to sneer at them just because poor cottages are so built. Red brick, when not too large, such as the delightful little Tudor brick, is smiling and domestic. The progress of building has, in this case, proved a retrogress for art. Nowadays, the big red bricks are so angular, so perfectly cemented that most blocks of flats approximate to102 workhouses, while the yellow brick now current should be reserved for public buildings of special distinction, such as national memorials and academies of painting. ”

“ In view of its very nature and the great variety of its proper uses, it should never displace the exterior masonry wall, which in stone, tile, or brick makes the most secure and enduring structure. If the 80 per cent of building in this country, now done of frame, were put into brick, or other durable and fire-resistive materials, it would result in a great economic national gain, people would have better and more substantial houses, and the lumber which everybody needs would be conserved for the legitimate uses to which it is admirably adapted. ”

“ THE SQUARE TOWER.
In the bricks themselves there is not enough variety. The stone bricks, it is true, have broken out into a variety of ugly shapes and a blue colour with which you can, if you like, build a Mansard roof. But a Mansard roof in [56] a coarse ugly blue tint, is no thing of beauty. Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support it, and if you make your building solid, every brick in your box will be used up, and all you will have to show for it will be a partially built wing of a peculiarly undesirable villa residence, replete with every modern inconvenience. ”

“ The plans in Plates VI, X and XVII, show how one stack can serve three rooms on the same floor with fire-places, and in the case of the double houses all the designs show that this method of saving expense has been adopted. Chimneys must be carefully built of good, hard brick, laid in cement mortar, the flues straight and smooth and of uniform size. To allow of better arrangement in the upper floors, the flues may be safely drawn on one side to at least 30° from the perpendicular. There must always be at least 8 inches of brick work when the chimney-stack comes in contact with any wood-work. ”

“ Flats don't rent for anything near what they do in New York. Out here they want the earth for fifty, sixty dollars a month; and we've got to give 'em the nearest thing to it for their money."
So when it came to the structure of the building, the contractor ordered the architect to save expense in every line of the details. The woodwork was cut to the thinnest veneer; partitions, even bearing-walls, were made of the cheapest studding the market offered; the large floors were hung from thin outside walls, without the brick bearing-walls advised by the architect. ”

“ In the matter of color, it is undeniable that the brick-work has in places a patchy look by reason of the comparatively small quantities in which it is used, the whole front on the avenue being virtually of highly wrought stone, and it seems clear that the building would have gained if the brick had been omitted altogether from this front. ”

“ The construction is of the most massive character, and the aim of the owners has been to produce a building monumental in solidity and perfectly fireproof. The brick and mason work is of unusual weight, the walls being in some places four feet thick, and the partitions and flooring have iron beams and framing, filled in with concrete and fireproof material. ”

“ A house and garage of this construction erected on the Scoria Lily ranch near Hettinger (see Tour 9) , because of [Pg 105] their unusually low building cost, have attracted wide attention. The use of native boulders as a building material is well illustrated in the Cairn, home of Mr. and Mrs. Clell G. Gannon in Bismarck.
Even with these attempts there is no native North Dakota architecture. The schools, farms, grain elevators, and false-front business buildings are common to the entire Midwest. ”

“ It is customary, all through the South, to build country-houses in this manner, and rarely with cellars. The props, which are sometimes of brick, but oftener of fat pine, which makes an underpinning almost as durable as brick, lift the building a few feet from the earth and allow a free circulation of air under it. This peculiarity, which strikes a stranger as unnecessary, is not so. A Northern man of my acquaintance, settled in North Carolina, told me that he built his house in the New-England style, with a close underpinning ”