Brick: The Paradox of Heaviness and Lightness

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Suddenly the brick occurs to mind when the story starts by talking about lightness. A brick itself is small and light enough to be handled by hand, but a brick house is hefty. The brick is made from dried mud; that makes clearer the meaning of lightness of brick. However, the land that holds the mud means a full deadweight. Heaviness from lightness and lightness from heaviness, there are various possible ways to look into the relationship between heaviness and lightness through the brick; that’s why we should talk about heaviness while keeping lightness in mind and vice versa.
The story of the three little pigs mirrors the heaviness of the brick. Their houses made of straw and sticks are blown away by the simple breath, revealing conversely the heaviness and solidity of the brick as a construction material. It is also an ample proof that numerous old buildings preserved today are mostly made of bricks or stones. The basilica where Leonardo da Vinci painted “The Last Supper” in 1494 was built of red bricks. Aula Palatina, as known as the Basilica of Constantine, was built with fired bricks around AD 310; this edifice …show more content…

It is also the result of the belief of the architect that the building should not oppose the environment. By constructing the same material in a more environmentally efficient way, the building is light in appearance but it doesn’t in functionality. The titles of some books on this architect who lead a new Australian domus in the form of a long and narrow, light-weight, roof work, comparable in its sheltering function to the bower of a tree or, in more morphological terms, to the turned up collar of an overcoat that shelters from the wind while subtly opening its front towards the sun , reveal the stubbornly prudent aesthetics of lightness: Leaves of Iron , Touch this Earth Lightly , Feathers of Metal

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