technē and poiēsis

Radzymin and Marki were two towns which were major brick-producing areas for Warsaw. They are very close together, along the same major road heading northeast out of the city; I passed them both on my quest for brickyards.  An unusual one at the H.G. Matthews factory. Jubilee bricks?

There are a lot of things that aren't working with this brick operation (more on that later), but one thing that is working is the sand on which the bricks rest. Since they have a profiled underside, they need to be supported during the first stage of drying to prevent collapse. I was afraid I would have to mill out lengths of wooden or styrofoam profiles, but then I received the suggestion of a simple sand rake, which is a much more resource-efficient method, as well as allowing me to dry as many more bricks at the same time.

I knew I wanted to site my construction at the back corner of the field, far away from the house and looking out over the valley and the wheat field. I'm glad I found a hole left over from a previous earth-casting test- less digging to do.  The Chilterns are actually chalk hills, and it was only during the last ice age that clay was pushed up from the valleys onto the ridges. Grymsdyke is on one such ridge.

O ne of the goals I set for myself for my time here at Grymsdyke is to acquaint myself with digital fabrication techniques. This brick mold is my first introduction to the potential of the CNC machine. I realize how much skill is needed to operate such a machine. You need to have a deep understanding of the behaviour of the material under the drill bit in order to set the speed, depth, and direction of each operation. I had help with this part- hopefully it is something I will learn in the future. As well, the milled pieces still require a lot of hands-on work, for their finishing, sanding, and assembly.  I added notches as handles, and filed the joints.

The 'custom mold' room. An amazing space filled with the legacy of bespoke modules.  After the desolation of the Warsaw brickyards, the bustle of the H. G. Matthews factory in Chesham was heartening. It was a hot, sunny day- perhaps England will have a summer after all- but they were doing a wood firing as well as making new bricks.  The forming process is interesting because they have two groups of workers, forming at the same time: one group works with a machine, and the other molds by hand. The machine-forming group. The worker on the right demolds the bricks that have come out of the machine, and spins them on the turntable to the worker on the left, who shelves them for drying. The brick-making machinery reminded me of the Charlie Chaplin film Hard Times , all squeaky gears, thick belts, and cogwheels. The hand-forming group. Wooden molds of four bricks each are filled, scraped, demolded, and shelved. They fire with both wood and oil; th...

Although Social Realism championed the brick and the bricklayer as a symbol of solidarity and popular labour, optimization and Modernist influences led to a decline in brick construction in Warsaw during the 1970's and 80's. Indeed, at that time, architecture in general suffered due to standardization and centralization.  In Poland in 1980, as many as 160 'factories of houses' produced large concrete panels which were used to build over 80% of apartments. The decade of the 1980's in Poland was a time of low standards and a permanent crisis in all spheres of life [...] The only way to bypass the strict building standards imposed on prefabricated housing construction and an opportunity to show designing skill was when a new church was to be designed and built. -  Majewski, Jerzy Stanislaw, Landmarks of People's Poland in Warsaw , Warsaw: Agora, 2010, p. 254  In many cases, the designers of churches chose to return to brick, and the church of Our Lady of...

So, the first test batch of bricks came out of the kiln, and I immediately set about smashing them. I had tested different proportions of sand and grog and I wanted to find out what was stronger.  I realized that grog makes stronger bricks- the ones made with sand were more crumbly and powdery. I think, though, that might be also due to the size of the particles. The sand I used was very fine, whereas the grog was coarser (see below). I also realized that the thicker bricks, like the one above, did not fire evenly all the way through. I have to design my module to be thinner. The mold I tested with a centre block did not work very well because I made the mistake of leaving the block in the clay while it dried, so the clay cracked from the shrinkage. I fired only a piece of the resulting brick- the colour difference is visible in the photo.

Clay used for making bricks must be mixed with fine-grained inert material to prevent cracking during drying and firing. Normally, sand is used, but grog, crushed fired brick, can serve the same purpose. I crushed some of the leftover tiles that we made in April and mixed them into a test batch of clay. I don't think this is a viable option for all the bricks due to time constraints, but it is good to know that all the materials for the brick itself can come from the same site.

I find that I am doing many tiny design projects as I go- one of them is to make my own clay sifter. The first one I made, with window screen, broke as soon as I threw the first handful of flinty clay onto it: I then had to get a stronger screen, which came in smaller pieces, and the frame I made was just slightly shorter than the recycling bin in which I'm collecting the clay. As well, after a week of beating it was in very poor shape:  So, I had to make another version. This time, I made the ends thicker, which will hopefully add strength as well as being a more convenient length.

There was a lot of sawdust from the fabrication projects that are happening here, so I thought I'd try pit firing some clay. There was a convenient hole left over from the digging, so I just filled it with sawdust and lit it.  It didn't turn out like I was hoping- I think the volume of sawdust was so great that it smothered itself. I did manage to dry a couple of bucketfuls of clay, though, so I can crush it and mix it with the stuff that is too wet.

Brick construction is still widely used in Warsaw, but from my observations, there is only one dominant company and type of brick: the Wienerberger Porotherm. These blocks are quite large- they can be over 30cm thick- but are still light enough to be handled by one worker. This is due to their honeycomb-like structure, with many thin walls of clay. Their structure and composition also makes them good insulators, which would explain their popularity. Wienerberger is, according to their website , the 'world's largest producer of bricks'. Production, however, is decentralized, and many countries have multiple quarries and factories all producing brick to Wienerberger specifications.  There are thirteen in Poland, with the nearest to Warsaw being Zielonka, less than 20km away. The standardized properties  include size, shape, and recipe- some of their clay blocks call for the addition of sawdust to the raw clay, which burns off in the kiln to produce microscopic air poc...

Clay is such a versatile material that there is nothing that dictates an 'appropriate' form for it to take. There is no grain or vein to be respected, like that of stone or wood. It is even arguably more flexible than other homogeneous substances such as concrete and plaster because in its raw state it is not a liquid, but a plastic paste that can be worked by hand.  As such, the criteria for the development of brick modules are not imposed by the material, but are at the discretion of the designer. In my case, I started with the idea of a 'notch'- something that might reduce the amount of material needed for each module, as well as provide a way that they could lock together. 

On the same walk with the employee from the Historical Museum of Warsaw, he stopped in front of a nondescript apartment complex and rang the buzzer. At the front desk, he spoke with the security guard and flashed his museum badge so that we could get into the courtyard. Isolated in the middle of the courtyard was a piece of building that had been encased in a conservatory-like construction. These are the remains of a synagogue- a rare reminder of a segment of Warsaw's population that was almost completely eradicated. But what a strange way to treat it- preserving it meticulously, but for no one to see.

The clay here at Grymsdyke is mixed with pieces of flint, which by itself is a beautiful stone, but the large pieces need to be removed in order to make bricks. The process we used for the workshop, hand-crumbling the clay into coin-sized pieces and picking it over for stones, was our only option, given that we had very little time and many eager people. This time, since I have more time but am alone, I am trying a different process, which involves 1 soaking the clay overnight 2 mixing it into a slurry with a hand-held power mixer 3 straining it 4 spreading it out to dry Number 4 is the most problematic so far, given the propensity of English weather to pour rain unexpectedly. I'm going to look into other options, such as making a batch of powdered dry clay to mix in.

While walking around the midtown with an employee from the Historical Museum of Warsaw, he points to a brick. "Warsaw, saw war" he jokes. I start to notice just how ubiquitous the signs of struggle are- the dented metal, chipped stone, and bullet-eaten brick of the Hala Mirowska are proof. This market hall is one of the few public buildings in Warsaw that has survived both world wars.

On the construction site of the Museum of Warsaw Praga, the bricks taken out of the wall of the tenement house are carefully stacked in order to be replaced in the new wall of the museum. In the centre there is a pile of huge bricks, which, if I understood correctly, were once part of a castle. 

The correct term for digging clay from the ground is 'winning' the clay. The Grymsdyke clay is mostly caramel-coloured, but with veins of white and red. At the end, the gardener said that 'you've probably got about nine tons there'. More than enough for what I'll be doing!

When I first searched for "brickworks" near Warsaw on Google, I thought finding an operational factory would be easy.  It turned out that many of the places I had marked on my map were abandoned. Many were graveyards for thousands of broken and whole bricks, not even deemed worthy of sorting and sale.  When I did find a working factory, it might as well have been abandoned. One sole worker shoveled coal to load the kiln. The machinery lay dormant, and only the green bricks on the drying racks gave any hint of ongoing production.

This is Buckinghamshire, UK. This landscape is: ...mostly rainy, but with a hint of sun ...mostly green, but with a hint of red ...mostly deserted but truly alive