Building Material: A Brick Reader

"I looked for an object that had not changed too much in the past few thousand years. This could have been a shoe or a knife, but a brick becomes part of a building and therefore part of our environment. So the brick appears as something of a poetic object.” – Harun Farocki

The book’s content produces a structure from which we can examine the multiplicity of ways that bricks are produced, used, and viewed. Stills from Harun Farocki's In Comparison correspond with writing on the geographic and economic factors of brick in society; the poetics, fictions, and visions of a brick stacker; a forum’s effort to create a communal archive; the pedagogical brick; the speculative commodity of clay; as well as reproductions of bricks and their sites of production. By monitoring the transformation of geological matter into clay, clay to brick, and brick to building, the book aims to stage comparison between processes inherent to bricks with other methods of knowledge production such as film, writing, and publishing.