Old House Journal – September 2019

Colorful, textural brick façades sprouted like wildfl owers

in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. The sales pitches were

certainly clever. I suspect that these examples illustrate a change

from texture to tone during the years between the wars—and

period examples are worth appreciation and preservation.

Around 1930, as the larger world awoke to the exigencies of

global economic collapse, the brick industry seems to have clung

sleepily to the textural theatrics that had served it so well in the

previous two decades. When the fashion for English, Norman,

and Tudor Revival houses took hold after 1900, texture was the

way to create ersatz iterations of late-medieval masonry. (Many

houses were, however, built with veneer brick over terra-cotta

block or stud-framed walls. The emphasis was all surface.)

Texture came from a party mix of materials: conventional

brick walls peppered with irregularly shaped stones, bricks

intriguingly abraded or shaped. Clinker bricks, those legendary

rejects of the kiln, beloved by Greene & Greene, seem to ooze

from the wall like overfi lled muffi ns. Most intriguing was

skintled brick, a texture conceit that turned tradi-

tional bricklaying on its head.

Skintling was not a single method but a reper-

toire of as many as seven related eff ects. Bricks were

set at diff erent angles so that, instead of following

a regular wall plane, they project from or recess

into it. Cooked up in the 1920s by Chicago architects

looking to put a novel spin on common brick (that

mundane standby of unit masonry), skintling often

featured squeezed-out mortar allowed to harden

in place. Though skintling zigzagged into the Depression

years in more reserved versions, the cunning unpredictability

of the results took a hit as homebuilders grew

conservative and the taste for texture receded.

As early as 1929, some prescient brick

manufacturers already were pushing color over clever masonry.

For example, the Illinois Brick Company promoted their

MUSINGS ON BRICK, 1929–1955

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THESE FANCIFUL BRICK HOUSES? By Gordon H. Bock

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ABOVE Skintled brick in a house at Winnetka, Illinois, “as developed by Chicago architects,” published in a brick-association manual.

TOP LEFT Finzer’s Forestblend: colorful bricks of distinction, with the Forestblend Oriental line meant “for small buildings.”

TOP RIGHT AutumTints Brick, from the Illinois Brick Company; bricks shown in Buff and Colonial tones.

HISTORY