Construction World June 2017

PROJECTS & CONTRACTS

BRUTALLY BRILLIANT BRICK Unlike Johannesburg architect, Thorsten Deckler, who feels that you can pretty much build anything with facebrick, many people over the decades have felt differently about utilitarian brick and concrete.

the 1950s to 1970s, and which has some severe critics, amongst them Charles, Prince of Wales. His writings and speeches have often been condemning of the movement and in 1987 at a Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee annual dinner he said: “When they (Luftwaffe) knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace with anything more offensive than rubble”. Luckily, not everyone shares these Brutalist sentiments. Deckler who, together with his wife Anne Graupner, runs a practice named 26’10 South Architects after the latitude of Johannesburg – this is in part a commitment to this rather fraught but exciting city – is a fan of brick. And, while many of us who grew up in the 70s still have mixed feelings about suburban facebrick housing, Deckler has less qualms professing to a “somewhat warm and fuzzy feeling for knotty pine and facebrick”. “I guess I associate these materials with both the happy homes I spent time in as well as a period in which honesty of materials was valued,” he explains. However, he admits that the opposite can also be true: exposed brick deployed in an oppressive environment can lead to a strong aversion for the material. Exposed brick Asked to name local and international architects that have worked with exposed brick who he admires, Deckler admits to being a fan of the Swedish Brutalist architect, Sigurd Lewerentz (1885 – 1975) and local architect, Jack Clinton. However, he wonders if, “Lewerentz fits the Brutalism bill 100 percent”? In photographs his work might seem forbidding but Deckler, who recently returned from a trip to Sweden where he visited a number of Lewerentz projects, comments that when you “visit his works, they feel humane, even friendly.” According to Deckler, Lewerentz used brick in a gripping manner which is witnessed in many of his projects from the Eneborg housing

In the inter-war years the English town of Slough was used as a dumping ground for redundant war materials and quite abruptly, just before World War 11, became the home of hundreds of ugly new concrete and brick factories. Betjeman was so struck by the desecration caused by industrialisation and what he perceived as the “menace of things to come” that he was prompted to write the poem but later regretted its harshness. The ‘new’ trading estate appearance of Slough, however, was a foretaste of the Brutalist brick movement, which flourished from Including English poet, writer and broadcaster, Sir John Betjeman who wrote a 10-stanza poem, entitled Slough which called for the destruction of the English town by the German Luftwaffe.

A window in Sankt Petri, seen from the inside. The glass was fixed to the outside of the walls by means of mastic so that no window frame would be visible, heightening the primal and raw qualities of the space.

Exterior of vestry offices at St. Mark’s in Bjorhagen showing characteristically thick mortar joints containing slate chips for additional strength.

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CONSTRUCTION WORLD JUNE 2017