Mimetic Materials and Cultural Importance
I fell in love with the color of clay from 30,000 feet. I flew alone in late winter, visiting a college I did not expect to attend. Georgia existed on a map to me. It was the name of a place 900 miles away, only becoming real from the plane window. The Northeast’s frozen landscapes softened into gentle greens and sandy yellows. Shorelines ebbed and flowed. Lakes and streams gave way to warm red earth. I left Boston in winter. When I arrived in Athens, I found myself in spring. The warmth convinced me to stay — magnolias, azaleas, and the color of clay. On the plane ride home, I pictured the rolling red landscape. I imagined the structures inhabiting it: structures built of red earth. I wondered how many millions of bricks compose the town of Athens — each one a fragment of earth and sunlight. When I returned to winter, I tracked traces of red earth through the snow.
Seasons shifted, and Athens became my new home. I moved in late summer and learned to live in an alien landscape. Summer turned to fall, and leaves began to rust. Fall gave way to winter, and rain washed down brick facades, turning the world a cold orange. Winter softened into spring, and the sun breathed life into blossoms, leaves, and bricks. By summer, I felt at home. I love hot afternoons, heavy air, and thunderheads a mile high. I love swimming in creeks, carried along by churning ochre water. I love lingering twilight that bathes the world in a gentle orange glow. Most of all, I love bricks and the color of clay.
Bricks are the most minimal expression of architecture. They are modular building blocks, simple and standardized. Bricks fit together into resilient lattices — perfect, infinite patterns contained within the built environment. They are a collective, forming walkways, walls, and facades. When used in mass, bricks become protean. Mortar bends harsh right angles into fluid curves. The brick’s rigid nature fades away. Each brick is insignificant, but regardless of scale, each brick remains beautiful.
The beauty of the brick lies in its subtle irregularities. It is a fragment of landscape compressed into a rectangular prism. It reflects the land it came from — minerals mixed in variable proportions: iron oxide, silica, lime. The brick is born in a kiln at several thousand degrees. It emerges tectonic and individual, marred by countless imperfections — crumbling corners, air pockets, hairline fractures. Irregularity introduces a level of detail seldom matched by other materials. Upon installation, color becomes relative. Sunlight shimmers on an expanse of polychrome scales. Mica, quartz, and feldspar catch the light. In fading twilight, red ceramic reflects the last rays of sun. It is warm to the touch, radiating heat with a faint internal glow.
A brick is a living thing. As seasons pass, its color fades. Wind and rain quietly soften the brick’s edges. The brick strays from its geometric ideal — cracking, crumbling, held together only by its neighbors, who are, in turn, eroded into individuals in much the same way. Eventually, the strange, organic beauty of weathering becomes too much; the brick is subject to demolition, decay, and abandonment. It is recycled, crushed, and spread underfoot. Aggregate absorbs soft footfalls, and fragments of land return to the landscape. I love the color of clay because it is multitude. A brick, the color of clay, is all the warmth and light in Georgia transmuted into a single building block.
