As a building material, brick has been used by mankind for more than 4 millennia. Archaeologists in China at the ancient site in Banpo discovered a unique structure, a special underground kiln for firing ceramic products, including bricks.
Scientists reliably know that brick was widely used in the construction of buildings and structures for various purposes in India, Egypt, Rome and Ancient Greece.
All over the world, builders continue to use various types of bricks to this day, depending on the standard of living, national traditions, climatic zones, areas of application, etc.
In many European countries, it is traditionally preferred to finish houses with plaster, so facing bricks are not very common there, you can most often find large-format blocks or effective bricks there. For example, houses in France are mainly built from stone blocks, and bricks are used exclusively for decorative purposes for interior masonry, fireplace decoration and landscape design. There, bricks with an unevenly colored front surface, having transitions of shades or scorch marks, are especially popular.
So, in England, colored facade bricks, often of dark shades, and bricks with a special textured surface are a huge success. In recent years, hand-moulded bricks made “antique” and having burns, underforming or surface defects have become very popular.
In Australia, which was part of the United Kingdom and developed exclusively by the British, most of the houses built were made of brick. The older houses are made of English size bricks, while the more modern ones are larger. Most of the buildings are clad in solid brick with many distinctive decorative elements and colorful masonry. In most cases, this is a tasteful combination of colors of the same tone, but with shades from dark brown to light sandy.
In some Asian countries with a warm climate, one can often see houses built using solid bricks that have not been fully fired. For a number of poor countries, such as Tibet in China, it is typical to use bricks in construction, which are molded by hand and then dried in the sun. In most cases, such bricks are made in larger sizes to save mortar and reduce labor intensity during construction. An interesting fact in the historical building traditions of one nation, but living in different countries – South and North Korea. A wide variety of colors and shapes has a facing South Korean brick, which allows you to build original houses, clad them in bright colors, and also be imported in a wide range to Australia and Japan. At the same time, in North Korea, facing bricks are used exclusively for finishing and decorating balconies, and the construction of houses is carried out mainly using concrete.
In many African countries, mainly where there are strong links with the former European metropolises and a large white population, there is a very significant contrast in the field of brick production: there are a large number of small handicraft shops for the production of bricks right in the open air with hand molding and firing in a small kiln, and, along with this, there are highly equipped factories that produce a wide range of high-quality and reliable bricks.
In a number of countries with high seismic activity (the Balkan countries, Greece, Mexico, Brazil and some countries of South America), they prefer to build houses using the monolithic frame construction technology, filling the gaps between the load-bearing walls with effective ordinary bricks, followed by plaster. Due to the mild climate and the absence of load-bearing bricks in this, it is used with an outer wall thickness of 5-6 mm, in contrast to the domestic one, in which GOST stipulates a thickness of at least 10 mm.
In Bolivia, hollow bricks are used for arranging ventilation in houses, and the masonry is performed as follows: a vertical row of bricks is laid across the main masonry, with holes outward.