The United Kingdom’s architectural landscape ranges from Roman baths and Palladian town houses to brutalist civic buildings, yet one of its most defining elements is the humble Fletton brick. Used in landmarks such as Battersea Power Station, Mancunian terraces, Guildford Cathedral, and the Templeton Carpet Factory, brick has shaped Britain’s urban identity through both modest and expressive design. However, traditional brick production is increasingly criticised for its environmental impact, particularly the fossil fuels used during firing. Despite this, brick remains valued for its durability, longevity, and thermal performance, securing its place in global architectural heritage. Rather than abandoning the material, architects and researchers are exploring ways to adapt its manufacturing and application to meet modern sustainability goals. Recent investigations highlight innovative responses worldwide, from reconstruction efforts in Ukraine to resource-conscious building techniques developed in Niger’s semi-desert environment.

Liene Jakobsone – Sampling Architects

Augustine Gardens in Riga, Latvia, portrays the sometimes-contradictory ways in which a neighbourhood can present itself as a civic entity, having both a singular and composite character. While the newly renovated street facade presents a polished and unified public face, this ‘united front’ belies the collage-like brick courtyard behind. The interior of the block is composed of an aggregate consisting of both the historical layers which the site contains and gestures the architects have made more recently. They have chosen to retain the materiality of different building eras and have enjoyed giving them an equality of status. New additions bring items of pre-existing metal work into play as fellow protagonists rather than as just inert historical artefacts. The way existing building elements have been treated, and new ones deployed, sets up an expectation perhaps that disparate characters can not only co-exist but thrive together.

‘The existing buildings began to take shape in the early twentieth century, yet they have been repeatedly rebuilt, extended, repaired, and adapted over time. A variety of brick types can be observed— reddish and yellowish ceramic bricks alongside white silicate units—each bearing witness to a distinct phase of construction. It is through our intervention—through conversion and adaptation to residential use— that the façade acquires an explicitly aesthetic dimension. In our view, careful act of cleaning, together with the introduction of subtle new details and functional adaptations are sufficient to render these once-neglected and modest buildings beautiful—perhaps for the first time. The material collage speaks of a long history, of continuity, of care: of a persistent will, across generations, to preserve rather than demolish and rebuild. This value is perceptible to contemporary inhabitants. It is a quality rooted in a tangible connection to the past—one that no new construction, however refined or efficient, can replicate.’

Kim Bartelt’s work mediates between the world of fragility and security; a contradiction that forms the backbone of human existence. Nothing is permanent and we’re all passing through. Communicating by way of ethereal, layered collage paintings, Kim illustrates these reflections through architectural block forms, from a distance uncompromising and meticulous, but up-close subtle and textured. We speak to Kim from her Berlin studio about influences that shaped her practice and the fragile connection between the seen and unseen.

‘When I finished my studies and I started working on set design, receiving all these wonderful props wrapped in packaging paper. The kind that you find stuffed within shoes or in clothing stores. They came in all sorts of colours, and they were normally thrown away, so I started collecting them. And at some point, when I moved back to Berlin, I thought what to do with them. I had a big canvas that I just collapsed the sheets on to, overlapping into geometric forms. I gifted it to my sister and the following year she said everyone who visits loves that painting. So, I quickly requested it back [laughs] to revisit what the work meant to me. The paper felt like a more apt medium than paint as it has this wonderful transparency that changes colour and texture when overlapped. You can see imperfections. You know, as the papers are so fragile, the compositions that I was working on were becoming increasingly static or angular. I speak of vulnerability through my work but use the forms to find stability. There’s a comfort and an integrity to these block-like shapes that organises the delicate nature of the medium. Fragile. Life is fragile.’

Blake Stacey – Mobile Crisis Construction

When Blake Stacey and his business partner Nic Matich devised a method for compacting waste material into interlocking brick forms, little did they know it could be a method in reconstituting war-resulting building debris. Mobile Crisis Construction was initially formed to combat regional issues in western Australia, such as housing shortages and lack of jobs. In the years since their inception, the start-up has devised portable brick making factories that have the capability to make modular blocks from degraded soil, building waste and fly ash, a by-product from coal combustion in power plants. Blake and his team are now seeking to maximise the potential of their technology in areas of conflict across the globe.

‘A good brick is composed from 2-5% local clay, about 8% cement and the rest crushed up recycled aggregate, about 5mm in size. We’re currently in the process of funding a new press that will be manufactured in Ukraine, with the completed mini factory compressing the bricks under 120 tonnes of force. This allows for quicker production than the machine we currently have deployed there, in theory doubling production from 2,000 to 4,000 bricks per day. When we started this project, bricks seemed the most straightforward and universal building material to compose from recycled material. Concrete masonry units, for example, need a bit of skill to lay with a 10mm mortar joint, string lines, tapping away with the trowel skills, all that sort of thing. Our blocks are about 4 kilos. They’re easy to lay and modular. You also don’t want to cut too much on site, and bricks need minimal altering. So all those things is why I went for bricks. We’ve had a really positive reception to what we’re doing. We’re currently working with the Philippine Education Ministry and the YMCA in Timor-Leste to create sports halls out of recycled bricks that can double up as community emergency shelters during storms and natural disasters. It’s a labour of love over a long period of time for us but we hope the groundwork has been set for us to really instigate positive change in parts of the world that have suffered such hardship.’ 

Toby Pear – Article 25

Article 25 is a leading architectural NGO working across the Global South, collaborating with local communities to deliver schools, hospitals, and homes. Their work sits at the intersection of project management, long-term design thinking, and education, creating buildings that maximise benefit for all involved—from concept through to completion. At the start of the year, Article 25 senior architect Toby Pear visited our studio to share insights into a recently completed classroom project in the capital of Niger, Niamey. Beyond the significance of adding eight new classrooms, an admin building, latrines and a water tower to a school already under pressure from increasing capacity, one of the most striking aspects of the project is its materiality.  

‘Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ is located in the Sahel – an incredibly arid landscape with little to no tree cover that spans across northern Africa. While local materials may not seem immediately obvious, the composition of the dry soil has been used for centuries in construction. This hardened earth, known as laterite, can be hand cut and dried to form sturdy blocks suitable for construction. Its embodied energy is minimal, and, for the new classrooms, it could be sourced within 10km from the site. We worked with local builders to cut the earth using hand tools into blocks as large as we could physically carry, loaded them onto tractors, and transported them to site. There’s a wonderfully rich texture to the material, and its climatic performance is almost unparalleled.’