The brick made civilisation possible, and will continue to do so

Lacking stone, the Mesopotamians developed sun-baked brick technology to such an extent that by 3000 BC they could make very large buildings with columns and terraces - the greatest of them, the Ziggurat of Ur, having an upper stage over 30m high and a base of 60m x 45 m. Go to the British Museum, and in the Mesopotamian rooms you can walk from 6000 BC, past the Sumerians of Ur, to the beautiful glazed fired bricks of Babylon around 650 BC.

In walking through the museum gallery, the other striking thing is the development of writing in Mesopotamia as a legacy to the future, born out of clay technology.

Today the world population exceeds 6.5 billion people, and is set to rise to 9.0 billion in the next quarter of a century. Building in brick, along with concrete, is going to be the basis of that vastly bigger global civilisation.

The reason is simple. Brick and concrete, often but not always faced with stone or ceramic, is a durable method of construction. Making buildings last longer matters. As populations grow we require more development, but we also have to replace the stock already built.

Civilisation has two choices. Either extend the service life of buildings, or find ways of making other kinds of buildings much faster. Both have proven to be viable strategies, but the brick offers the long service life possibility as standard.

Designed to accommodate change and services upgrades, a brick structure will last. If other construction technologies are to challenge the brick, they will have to improve on the rate of building production.

The tragedy is that currently about one billion people are living in squatter settlements of much poorer construction, and without an increase in the productive capacity of global construction that figure is expected to double in the time it takes to reach the 9.0 billion total.

So for the inspired Spiked! Online survey, launced today in association with Pfizer - What's the greatest innovation? - I nominate the fired clay brick, as the technology for all other construction methods to beat. May all nations manufacture and lay more of them each year over the coming quarter of a century than at any previous time in human history.

Brickwork has stood the test of time as an additive construction technology. But there are new ones. For his nomination, Austin Williams, Director of the Future Cities Project, looks forward to when rapid prototyping, developed over the last 20 years as a 3D printing technique for small objects generated from a computer model, has advanced to be a tool for the full size production of the built environment:

"The potential for architects and engineers to test out ideas, and explore what elements will look like is exciting enough. The scope for creating the very object - or the whole building - rather than a scale model, is something I may have to wait another 20 years for."

If researchers at Loughborough University have their way the world will not have to wait that long for full size rapid prototyping as an additive technology. Founded in 1992 the Rapid Manufacturing Research Group (RMRG) within the Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Loughborough University is recognised as the world's leading research group in the field of rapid manufacturing; in the development of rapid prototyping and rapid tooling technologies and applications. RMRG are working with the Civil and Building Engineering departments at Loughborough on a joint project called Freeform, with a view to not only prototyping, but manufacturing building components and volumetric structures.

Freeform aims to use the principles of rapid manufacture to take construction technology way beyond anything the industry has seen. The technology should print full-scale components and structures, layer by layer, free from the constraints of straight line form. Freeform expects to utilise computer-based 3D solid modelling to drive the precise control of construction material deposition in an automated process which, the researchers claim, will offer benefits over "traditional" approaches:

• Increased geometrical freedom
• Structural optimisation
• Single material construction
• Function integration
• Reduction in assembly complexity

Bold claims worth pursuing with serious research and development funding. Freeform is a £1.2m project, and is the realisation of two years research and £300K of investment which demonstrated the feasibility of the approach. Funded by the EPSRC, and with significant industrial contribution, the four year project will concentrate on machine development, inception of new materials and process, investigating interface and function design interaction, and on developing control and design generation tools.

Don't get me wrong: Freeform is really exciting as an unprecedented technology that promises to generate building components, and eventually whole buildings. Engineered architecture that has never been possible to make before. Combined with the great advances being made computer aided design, robotics and materials science more generally, Freeform could create architectural and engineering wonders. The sorts of wonders being drawn by people like Smart Geometry. The funding will be well spent in that eventuality.

However, until Freeform techniques become generalised reality, the original, and most relied upon additive construction innovation remains the brick, along with block and stone. Freeform is imagined to be a response to a skills shortage in "traditional" construction, which really means masonry. There is no skills shortage, as far as I can see, just a shortage of land in Britain for people to apply and improve brick, block, and stone laying skills upon. To apply and improve any technology upon.

While masonry has a tradition inseperable from civilisation, brick, block and stone construction continues to advance with society. Calling masonry "traditional" is merely the flip side to calling masonry "modern", when what is really in question are the benefits of the technology in widespread building production.

Also, and until commercial manufacturers using techniques like Freeform produce buildings routinely, it is only the existing labour force with their ongoing skills development in the use of established materials that is keeping the construction industry going.

With no skills or material shortage, new site-built wall arrangements incorporating new forms of thermal insulation are being developed to maintain optimal structural design, and with new building services becoming available as removeable cassettes or podularised “upgrades” for long life structures, it will be masonry construction that continues to make civilisation possible. Extraordinary architecture aside for the moment, there are millions of homes needing to be built in Britain, and billions of homes to build internationally - now. The vast majority of those, at least in England, Wales and Ireland, will be masonry. The end of masonry has been greatly exaggerated by innovators, at a time when much more building activity is needed, here, and globally.

As amazing and necessary as advanced construction methods are, the pressing question is how much development can Britain build every year on the land that is made available through the planning system. That depends less on innovation in isolation, and more on the land supply regulated by the development control system.

So bring on innovation in building production, but understand that unless land, required to apply technology to, is also available the tendency will be for the innovative techniques to remain as research. Construction innovation needs funding for research AND land for development: R&D.

The Mesopotamians lacked stone and so invented bricks, but Britons lack developable land on an island that is less than 10% developed but 100% planned. Short of building up there is no substitute for building out.

Ian Abley 01.05.2007

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org. All material is Copyright © 2000 - 2007 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.