Of course, modern building standards being what they are, the courses of bricks quite often haven't been laid straight, even in high profile, high prestige buildings like these. That pointing is pretty dreadful, too.
There are other reasons for brickwork round here to be less than exemplary. Southampton is pretty much a town built on a heap of sand and gravel. The ground beneath our feet is riddled with shifting underground waterways that eat away at the stability of any building. Add to that the pasting the town took from the Luftwaffe in WW2 -- three bombs fell in our street, a good mile away from the dockside action -- and any pre-1940s building is going to have cracks and crazy angles in it somewhere.
But sometimes the patterning of the brickwork can add something, as I think it does here.
9 comments:
There are examples of my late step-father's brickwork, around the campus. He was a perfectionist, and employed the same standards at work, as he did when building his own house. Towards the end of his life, he used to despair at the sight of poor pointing. And, there's a lot of it about.
Martin,
No disrespect to your step-father, but there's something amusing, in an Alan Bennett-ish sort of way, about the idea of a man driven to despair by poor pointing...
I was once given a deeply-felt tutorial on the different qualities of "Bursledon Reds" and "Beaulieu Buffs" by a local builder -- maybe it was him?
He didn't work on the Hartley building, did he? Some NW corners have just been re-pointed, apparently by a 5-year-old using white playdough... Just as well he's not around to see it.
Mike
It's poor welding for me, you just look at some of it and think if you'd just spent a little more time. Not of course that I can weld but I have had cause to inspect a few.
The thing I love about brick work, particularly old red bricks is the colours you get in the low sun.
Martin's stepfather is in good company Churchill was a keen amateur bricklayer who built the wall around his house, slightly more constructive hobby than Lloyd George who if I remember correctly used to cut down trees
Gavin
Gavin,
My father did an apprenticeship in a engineering firm, so could weld, turn a lathe, all that stuff. The garden swing he made for us kids from angle iron was so strong and stable you could have used it as a derrick in a shipyard...
Add a certain sniffiness about poor workmanship to an insistence on "buying British", and not a lot of manufactured goods got past our door.
Mike
Mike,
I knew when I was taking this snap of a Bridget Riley painting how painful the barrel distortion would be. But I enjoyed the bendy vertical lines in a masochistic kind of way.
Huw
Huw,
Ouch! Have you not discovered the "distortion correction" tools in Photoshop (I use Elements 10, currently, not the "real thing")? They really do work. Within reasonable limits you can turn your point-and-shoot into a "software view camera"!
Mike
Mike,
The copy of Elements I use may be antediluvian (it's certainly not 10) but I'll take a look. Thanks for the tip.
Huw
Huw,
Look under "filters" -- not sure which version introduced it. It's a simple but effective tool.
Mike
Actually, the other useful "lens correction" tool is BreezeBrowser -- it actually has a library of lenses for which standard corrections will be applied when converting from RAW. I don't use it to convert my RAW files now that Elements is compatible with Adobe Camera RAW, but it was really effective.
Mike
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