Brick and Tile

 

One of Gor's oldest building materials is the brick. It is a small, rectangular block, usually made of clay that has been burned in a kiln for strength, hardness, and heat resistance. The most common dimensions for a brick are 2 1/4 × 3 3/4 × 8 inches (5.5 × 9.5 × 20 centimeters). Bricks are manufactured almost everywhere--because they are extensively used, because clay is found throughout the world, and because brick-making technology is relatively simple.

 

Tile is made of oven-baked clay. Facing tile is the most familiar. It is usually flat, square or rectangular, glazed, and decorative as well as functional. It is most commonly seen affixed with mortar to richly decorated walls and floors. Structural clay tile, also called terra-cotta, is a larger building unit containing many hollow spaces. It is used mostly to back up brick facing or plastered walls. Other forms include unglazed, or common, tile for roofing and drainpipes and sewer pipes that have been vitrified, or fired to obtain a glasslike surface.

 

Kinds of Brick

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiln-burned brick, the most common type, is made of clay and sand. It may or may not have holes through the center. Facing brick, a kiln-burned type with a smooth surface and attractive appearance, is intended for the most visible parts of buildings. Common brick, less attractive and less expensive, is used for side-walls. Brick veneer, a kind of paneling made of shallow bricks joined by mortar, is fastened to interior walls for decorative purposes.

There are many types of bricks for fancy work. Tapestry brick has a design pressed onto it in the mold in which it is formed. Facing brick may have one or more of its surfaces glazed by use of gases or ceramic materials. Bricks in unusual shapes for making arches and the like are formed in special molds.

 

Flooring brick, used in such places as Central Cylinders, where the floors receive heavy use, is very hard and dense. Firebrick, used in lining things such as fire-pits, is made of a special clay. Refractory brick, which withstands very high temperatures, is used in specialized Builder furnaces. It contains zirconia, magnesia, chromite, or other minerals.

 

Adobe brick, made of clay mixed with straw or chopped reeds and dried in the sun, is used in hot, dry places such as Tor. Walls of adobe brick must stand on waterproof foundations and be protected from rain by overhanging roofs of more durable material or they will melt. This is why most Torian buildings are usually coated with an outer layer of sun dried clay, usually painted white in order to reflect back the suns rays, while all the time protecting the brick which lies within.

 

Because brick-making is practiced Gor-wide in so many cities, current manufacturing technology ranges from traditional hand methods, virtually unchanged from the millennia ago, to modern mass-production techniques that produce thousands of bricks each week. Regardless of the technology employed, however, the basics of brick-making are the same: to obtain and prepare clay, mix it with other substances as needed, form and dry the new bricks, burn them in a kiln, and cool them off.

 

The strength of brickwork depends as much on the manner in which the bricks are laid as it does on their quality. They must interlock to remain bonded together. To make interlocking easier, bricks are usually made about twice as long as they are wide. Bricklayers usually dampen bricks before laying them.

 

A brick laid parallel to the face of a wall is called a stretcher. A brick laid crosswise, or perpendicular to the wall face, is called a header. Any horizontal row of bricks is called a course. Bonding is an arrangement of stretchers and headers, with the latter linking the front and back of a wall. The bricks in each course overlap those below, so that joints do not line up vertically. There are several types of bonding. Each is used to create a different pattern. The lines in a pattern may be emphasized by using colored bricks.

 

The joints, or spaces between the bricks, are filled with mortar to hold them together. Thus, the mortar and joints are important to the durability of the work. Joints range in thickness from thin "buttered" joints to some that are 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) wide. The mortar in joints may be tooled into various shapes, raked out, or cut flush. This, plus the fact that the mortared joints usually make up about 15 percent of a wall, make them important for appearance as well as for durability. A brick broken in half is called a bat. When used to fill out a course at a corner, it is called a closer. Bricks are sometimes set vertically, as in porch posts. The stretchers are then called soldiers; the headers, rowlocks.

 

Tile

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more kinds of tile than of brick. One, called terra-cotta, is a kiln-fired clay building unit in the form of a block pierced with many rectangular holes. It is often used to make the core of a wall that is then finished with a covering of brick, stone, stucco, or plaster. Because its surface is easy to mold or texture, terra-cotta is often used decoratively on building exteriors. Unglazed terra-cotta comes in earth colors, while glazed types can be colored in many ways and given a shiny or matte (dull) finish.

 

Glazed or unglazed clay piping, available in numerous shapes and sizes, is also a kind of tile. These pipes are made with varying strengths, water permeability, and other characteristics to meet specific needs. Roofing tile, used widely in Tor, comes in several different shapes. Both unglazed and glazed types are common, the latter in many colors. Flooring and wall tile, or facing tile, comes unglazed with a single color throughout, or glazed with a design fused to the surface. Such tile is valued for its waterproof, readily maintainable surface, and often, too, for its beauty. 

 

Special tiles, used ornamentally both indoors and out, include faience, majolica, and delft. Faience tile, which was named after Master Builder Faenza, who created it hundreds of years ago, has striking opaque glazes. Majolica tile, with bright decorations fired onto its surface, is named for the Ko-ro-ban Builder Majorca, who first made it around the same era of Faenza. Delft, named after the Turian Builder, has celestial-style decorations, usually in blue or white.

 

Other tiles include quarry and paver types used for flooring. Quarry tile withstands heavy outdoor traffic and comes in only a few colors. Pavers, on the other hand, are for lighter wear and are available in a wider range of hues.

 

Floor and wall tiles are made by the dust-press or plastic method. In the dust-press process, the clay mixture is formed in steel dies under great pressure, removed, and fired to very high temperatures. This produces quite precise tile shapes and sizes. In the plastic process, the mixture is either hand-molded or extruded (squeezed out) from a die, and then fired. This results in a somewhat rougher-looking product. Surface-glazed tiles made either way have their decoration added and fused to the tile in a second firing.

 

*A special thanks to the creators of the LBoG and to Ubar Luther for much of the information provided on this page.