AutumTints Brick line as “Striking beauty at Low Cost.”
It featured a naturalistic palette “similar to... a forest
after the fi rst touch of frost,” and at a price “very little
more than common brick.” The Finzer Brothers Brick
Company met them toe-to-toe with their Forestblend
products. Although the palette was a “blending of reds,
browns, blues, tangerines, greens, and polychromes
representing the shades and tints of the autumn forest,”
Finzer goosed the eff ects and saturation to “daring
contrasts” in their Oriental and Range 456 lines, these
deemed “suitable only for smaller surfaces.”
By the 1940s, house styles as well as aesthetics were
going in new directions. Period writing suggested that a
house with “straight architectural lines, with all slopes
eliminated, immediately stamp it as strictly modern.” No
surprise that, where there’s little other surface treatment
to catch the eye, “modern homes demand color.”
Indeed, if one brick color is good, two may be better.
“Combinations of colors are often used,” noted the Brick
Institute in 1940, citing “the strictly modern type of
architecture, which is rapidly growing in popularity.”
This might suggest a two-tone treatment, where
“horizontal panels of protruding brick” are highlighted
with a darker shade, or even two colors on the same brick
in the form of iron spotting. Following this logic, some
schemes mixed bricks of diff erent colors.
Where do you go from there? Back to texture—with
color—all in the same wall.ohj editor emeritus gordon bock is an architectural
historian, instructor with the National Preservation Institute
(npi.org), co-author of The Vintage House, and an in-demand
speaker: gordonbock.com.
JIMDRAEGER
/APT^ BUILDING^ TEC
HNOLOGY
HERITAG
E^ LIBRAR
Y/ARC
HIVE.ORGCover and plate from a
dealers’ book by Structural
Clay Products Institute, 1940.
Modern homes demand
color, said tastemakers and builders in the
1940s, as nontraditional house styles made
headway. Two-tone brick schemes might
take the place of ornament.