Politics of Bricks

Spriya Sharma
(School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi)

At the Chhatrams of Thanjavur, brick was far more than a structural necessity; it was an art form where intricate carvings transformed simple blocks into welcoming, spiritual spaces for travellers. But why was brick chosen for these rest houses while stone was reserved for temples? While not every region in India could match the excellence found in Thanjavur, the desire to elevate brick into art, by chipping it or creating false joints, was a shared instinct among masons.

When the British arrived, they introduced a conflict of "architectural morality." They debated whether it was "dishonest" to conceal brick under layers of plaster or to carve it in imitation of stone's prestige. They eventually sought to retrain Indian masons to follow the rigid, uniform logic of British masonry, pushing aside local artistic traditions. It leaves us to wonder: did we truly learn something new, or did we simply forget what we already knew?

The identity of the brick is deeply complex. It is frequently labelled a
"common man's material" simply because it is born from the earth available beneath our feet. But is that really true? While clay is abundant, the creation of a brick is a complex, step-by-step craft, from the precise moulding and drying to the finality of the firing.

In the end, whether a society chooses to use brick, hide it, or carve it tells us a lot about their priorities, their hierarchies, and their relationship with the land they build upon. Even brick shortages, which have occurred in history, were tackled in ways that reveal a society's priorities.

Brick Ecologies: Farm, Soil, and Land at the Edges of Urban Expansion

Akshar Gajjar
(EPFL, Lausanne)

Brick made in the agrarian landscapes of Charotar, Gujarat is not only a construction material but an active mediator of land relations between agriculture and urban expansion of Anand City. The clayey fertile soil that grows paddy, banana, bajra, cotton, is also ideal for making bricks on the kins that are nested within farmlands. As brick kilns utilize the surrounding soil, they slowly transform the productive capacities of these lands, thus making them susceptible to speculative construction. This relation between brick, farm soil and land relations is entangled within structures of state, caste and class that govern, whose land is transformed, using whose labor, and who profits from these transformations. My work aims to trace the making and use of brick in Gujarat to unravel transforming ecologies and land relations and further investigate how the two are co-forming.

In this presentation I will unpack the triad of brickmaking, land transformation and construction through the methodology of itineraries, rather than linear commodity chains. In preliminary fieldwork on kins during monsoon closure, unexpected movements became visible - cows, buffaloes, goats, shepherds, broken bricks, and crops moving in and around dormant kilns - that do not fit neatly into a sequential journey of extraction, production, transport, and use. What does following shorter itineraries of different bricks and humans, nonhumans and objects around them tell us about the embeddedness of urban expansion within the constellation of rural ecologies?