Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.
Rules · Materials · Walls · Structure
A skin of baked brick bedded in bitumen
Build the core of sun-dried mud brick; case it with baked brick laid in bitumen, with layers of reed matting through the mass and weep holes to let water out.
In the stoneless plain of Mesopotamia brick was the only permanent material. Mud brick is cheap but dissolves in rain; baked brick is durable but costs fuel. The ziggurat of Ur has a mud-brick core wrapped in a casing of baked brick about 2.5 m thick, set in bitumen, with weep holes to drain the core.
Herodotus describes the walls of Babylon made of bricks baked from the earth of the moat, laid in hot bitumen with a layer of reed mats every thirty courses. Vitruvius, too, remarks that the wall of Babylon was built of burnt brick with asphalt in place of lime and sand (I.5.8).
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Lay the city out square, walled and moated, with the river through its middle; run the streets straight, some along the river and others across it at right angles, each ending at a gate in the wall along the bank.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A skin of baked brick bedded in bitumen”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/baked-brick-bitumen. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.