Discover the beauty of brick bonds in this new book

Brick Bonds by Melissa Price

(Image credit: Melissa Price)

Melissa Price’s new book Brick Bonds celebrates this enduring construction material via the physicality of a carefully designed and printed tome.

Dedicated to exploring the various ‘bond patterns’ used over the centuries to lay bricks in the most efficient and structurally secure ways – ensuring that vertical mortar channels are never aligned with each other – Brick Bonds is a book about pattern, craft and history.

Brick Bonds is Swiss bound — *Brick Bonds* is Swiss bound

Discover the beauty of ‘Brick Bonds’

As Price says, ‘we are surrounded by bricks, but seldom dwell on the patterns used to build them into walls and structures’. The book explores the history and form of bond patterns, reproducing 50 of them with elegant graphic clarity across its 96 pages.

With patterns spanning the decorative, geometric, functional and combinations of all three, this is a precise and graphically rich way of learning more about architectural history.

A spread from Brick Bonds — A spread from *Brick Bonds*

Key facts are gleaned along the way, such as how structural strength is maximised in arrangements like English Bond and Flemish Bond, often seen in Georgian architecture and with bricks laid both ways (headers and stretchers) to increase the density and solidity of a wall.

Other methods can be used to create cavity walls, while the most elaborate and familiar decorative patterns – Double Stretcher Garden Wall Bond, for example – become an integral architectural component.

‘The bond names have an unexpected poetry, in contrast with their practical and down-to-earth use,’ says Price (also the author of Monarchy, a graphical history of the British Royal Family). ‘Terms such as staggered, raked and stacked refer to different ways of overlapping the courses to provide strength.’

The physical book itself is, of course, sized to reference the proportion and colour of a standard brick. With tactile Munken Lynx Rough paper and a foil-blocked gloss red cover using the organic feel of Cairn Eco paper, the book has a Swiss binding, freeing the spine from the front cover to allow it to lay flat.

Price has self-published the book in an edition of 300, making this a beautiful and insightful volume for the brick-loving architect in your life.

A stack of Brick Bonds — A stack of *Brick Bonds*

Brick Bonds, Melissa Price, £25 at the Architectural Association Bookshop, Present and Correct and from MelissaPrice.BigCartel.com, MelissaPrice.co.uk

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Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. He is now the magazine’s Transport and Technology Editor. Jonathan has written and edited 15 books, including Concept Car Design, 21st Century House, and The New Modern House. He is also the host of Wallpaper’s first podcast.