There’s been a resurgence in beautiful brick baseball stadiums in the last few decades. Oriole Park at Camden Yards was the first high profile ballpark to bring back the old-time charm of baseball venues, calling on brick as a major component. Since then many other newly-constructed stadiums have put brick’s design flexibility to work using a variety of new and old styles, but keeping the “it just feels right” character of brick at the center of their designs.

Minor League ballpark, Hodgetown, in Amarillo, Texas, puts a new-old spin on brick ballparks by incorporating a Midwest art deco style. Designers from Populous built a park that emulated the feel of adjacent downtown Amarillo, kicking off a new phase of revitalization for the area.

It’s that time again. The Brick Industry Association (BIA) is accepting entries into its annual design competition. If you are an architect or designer who’s firm completed a great project done in at least 50% clay brick over the last several years, you should definitely enter the Brick in Architecture Awards. Here are three reasons why.

Brick cavity wall design places a single wythe of brick on the facade of a building and backs it up with a supportive structure of wood or steel studs, concrete masonry units, or some other load bearing skeleton. Between that structure and the brick veneer is an air space of one or more inches that allows any water that penetrates the veneer to flow harmlessly down the back side of the brick to the building’s foundation.

But what happens then? Why does the air space not fill up with water like a tiny but disproportionately deep swimming pool? The key to making the cavity wall system work is a small, unnoticed, and disrespected feature of modern brick construction: weeps.

Form follows function. It’s a well known design principle, but in the case of the Fitts-Woolard hall on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University, the form is the function.

Using two brick colors from Yankee Hill Brick set at varying depths, the west building on the Farm Credit Services of America corporate campus is an abstract view of the Midwest landscape from the hypothetical vantage of a drone. Why a drone? Drones occupy an expanding role in the practice of precision agriculture, itself a product of high tech tools and a rapid pace of innovation. The different depths of brick provide an ever-changing pattern of shadows throughout the day. Visualizing the facade treatment in this way is a nod to the ever-changing face of agriculture and the innovativeness of its practitioners.

In our last post we talked about three design details in brick that are increasingly finding their way into structures with contemporary styles. While those details contribute to striking, innovative, modern designs, brick can always be counted on for familiar — but no less striking — traditional design details as well. Below are three well known brick masonry details that never fail to please.