20's brick buildings

[doctorwayne]

As pointed out previously, most brick structures, at least in the early days, used locally-made brick. Its colour and quality would depend a lot on that of the local clay. Often, building fronts would be built of better-quality brick, if not available locally, then brought in from elsewhere.

Part of this (half) house used to be home, many years ago, and was the same colour as all of the other houses in the neighbourhood, along with a late-Victorian-era school two doors to the left and another school a couple of blocks to the right. While most of the brick here has been painted, there's a small area over the door where the former porch roof has been removed, revealing the original brick colour. Peeling paint on the grey building next door (formerly a fish & chip shop) reveals more orange brick, as do the backs of the row houses beyond:


I attempted to duplicate this colour using Floquil Reefer Orange:






Many brick buildings were painted to preserve the brick, either because the brick itself was too porous, or because the wall had been re-pointed, with paint being used to cover the patchwork appearance. Early mortar was often quite white, due to the high lime content, but coloured mortar later became more common. If you paint two structures the same "brick" colour, then apply different-coloured mortar to each, you might be surprised how much the appearance is altered.

Here's a building of the former Cockshutt Plow Company, in Brantford, Ontario. One of the older buildings still remaining, it's built of locally-made buff brick, very common in this and surrounding areas, and used for factories, stores and homes, both grand and modest (looks like DPM gone wild in this example ):



Immediately adjacent is this newer brick curtain wall structure (I'm guessing 1920s-era), in red brick:


A similar, if not identical brick was used on the main office building and Time Office:


This Brantford house makes use of orange brick, with quoined corners and windows of buff brick, and what appears to be a redder brick on the chimneys:


The Brantford train station uses a different version of buff brick (there appears to be a repaired area, too):


And, on the same property, the former Express building, now used by the MoW department - same brick, I think, but not quite so clean:


In Goderich, Ontario, the CNR station, on one side of town...


...appears to be constructed of brick similar to that of the CPR station on the other side of town:


In the latter picture, note the differences in colours between the brick beside the windows at the top of the turret, the brick under the eaves, the brick revealed where the former platform roof has been removed, and the brick nearer to ground level, where it had been protected for many years.

Wayne