Brickwork

Brickwork is masonry produced by a bricklayer, using bricks and mortar. Typically, rows of bricks—called courses— are laid on top of one another to build up a structure such as a brick wall.

Brick is a popular medium for constructing buildings, and examples of brickwork are found through history as far back as the Bronze Age. The fired-brick faces of the ziggurat of ancient Dur-Kurigalzu in Iraq date from around 1400 BC, and the brick buildings of ancient Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan were built around 2600 BC. Much older examples of brickwork made with dried (but not fired) bricks may be found in such ancient locations as Jericho in Judea, Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, and Mehrgarh in Pakistan. These structures have survived from the Stone Age to the present day.

Parts of brickwork include bricks, beds and perpends. The bed is the mortar upon which a brick is laid. A perpend is a vertical joint between any two bricks and is usually—but not always—filled with mortar.

The dimensions of these parts are usually co-ordinated such that two bricks laid side by side separated only by the width of a perpend have a total width identical to the length of a single brick laid transversely on top of them.

An example of a co-ordinating metric commonly used for bricks in the UK is as follows:

In this case the co-ordinating metric works because the length of a single brick (215 mm) is equal to the total of the width of a brick (102.5 mm) plus a perpend (10 mm) plus the width of a second brick (102.5 mm).

There are many other brick sizes worldwide, and many of them use this same co-ordinating principle.

A brick is given a classification based on how it is laid, and how the exposed face is oriented relative to the face of the finished wall.

The practice of laying uncut full-sized bricks wherever possible gives brickwork its maximum possible strength. In the diagrams below, such uncut full-sized bricks are coloured as follows:

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