Architect Morris Adjmi has been called “The Brick-Master.” His luxury condominium creation at 116 University Place in New York City certainly lends credence to that title. It uses an understated canvas of buff-gray brick from manufacturer Glen-Gery as a background for dramatic, deeply-corbeled, oversized window openings to create depth and shadow like only brick can.

In fact, Adjmi highlighted this particular talent of brick in a 2022 interview with CityReality saying, “One of the things I always try to do is create a building animated by shadow and light. Brick lends to creating that kind of detail that makes a building feel alive and feel contextual that it has substance, it’s not just a thin veil.”

Did you know that the Brick Industry Association (BIA) has calculators to help you determine the cost of brick construction compared to other facade materials? And they aren’t just hyper-generalized, click-bate, data-scraping calculators either. They are specific to your region and openly compare the cost of brick to competitors. Calculators are available for residential cladding, including one that compares square foot costs and one that puts those costs into the context of your mortgage.

BIA’s non-residential calculator goes so far as to apply costs for brick and its competitors on many different types and sizes of commercial and institutional structures, including apartment buildings, college dorms, hospitals and schools!

Brick is a material that can restore and reinvigorate even the most hopeless of building sites. In the case of the lot that stands at the corner of 45th and East 7th Street in New York City, a devastating and deadly gas explosion destroyed the three historic tenement buildings that once stood there. But as is true of any shocking tragedy, what matters most is how we react and respond.

Brick manufacturers haven’t yet figured out a way to make individual brick units flex (though great designers and masons can come close), but no other material is capable of greater design flexibility than brick. It’s one of the greatest attributes of fired clay brick, but what exactly does it mean?

Ask around in architectural circles and you’ll get many different definitions of “design flexibility,” but in the specific context of designing and building with brick, you’ll probably hear the same few themes over and over again.

Though often thought of as nothing more than a dependable building material, the substantial weight of brick can also be the perfect medium to express monumental emotions and historical impact. The designers at Substance Architecture and artist Kerry James Marshall found that to be true when they set out to create A Monumental Journey, a sculpture in Des Moines, Iowa, celebrating the legacy of black lawyers who founded the National Bar Association in 1925.