99% Invisible - (Not Just) Another Brick in the Wall

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

A closer look at the messy, beautiful bricks hiding across Chicago. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Manadnach building in Chicago is unlike any structure you'll ever come across. A few years back, I brought my wife Joy to gaze upon it with me because, you know, of course I did. Okay, and so I want you to, I'm not trying to quiz you, but, but like, I want you to tell me, like, what you see when you see this building. Like, what are some of its characteristics? Okay. Well, it's massive, but not in the same way, like, super tall.

like these other skyscrapers. Yeah, it feels heavy. But yes, it feels heavy, dense. Built in 1891, the Menadnach is an office building that is needed shoring up to keep it from sinking beneath its own weight. From the sidewalk, the structure's purplish-brown facade rises in one smooth, continuous motion. There are no gargoyles or decorative moldings. Instead, what you notice is how the building gently curves or rounds where you typically expect a sharp corner or a flat edge. Its entrances and windows are also set deep into the wall,

like four or five, even six feet back. And that's because the Manadnik was built the old school way by layering and stacking brick upon brick upon brick, six feet thick at the base and 16 stories into the sky. So this is the tallest masonry skyscraper in the world. So it is completely made of bricks. So the Menadnik, to me the really remarkable thing about it is that it is so utterly seamless. It's all this sleek, perfectly produced brick. This is Will Quam, a fellow Monadonok lover and a scholar of the essence of this building, bricks. I've had people ask me with the Menadnach, you know, did they get all these flat bricks at sight and then start chiseling them?

And no, they made hundreds of special molds for these particular bricks. They also then, when they fired them, had to be incredibly careful in firing them so that they knew they would all come out about the exact same color. So the monadnac is a really, to me, the perfect demonstration of what a brick could be at that time in the world. In the palm of your hand, a single modular brick is often unremarkable. But together, bricks can transform into a wall or an arch or a building, and occasionally maybe even something remarkable, like the Menadnach. My version of the analogy is that bricks are like brushstrokes in a van go. Each one is a beautiful part of a more beautiful hole.

You get up close and you can appreciate it in a different way than if you step all the way back. As a way of celebrating the building blocks of his home city, Will found it Brick of Chicago, an award-winning architecture tour. So I give tours of 12 different neighborhoods around Chicago that start from a place of brick architecture of I'm going to make you passionate and excited about a brick. And then once you're passionate and excited about a brick, what else can I make you start to see and care about? You know, on my tours, it's almost like a dare. Why would I go on a brick tour? What could I, what could this possibly be?

I guess I got to find out. Will also recently wrote a book called Fire and Clay, how bricks reveal the hidden history of Chicago. using the city as both muse and case study, Will weaves together a modern history of brick. And in the process, offers us new ways to appreciate this humble building material. Here's my chat with Chicago brick historian, Willa Quam. Okay, so like in its simplest form, what is a brick? What is a brick? A brick is a clay building block that is burnt.

And so, you know, by that definition, humans have been building with bricks for thousands of years. Yeah. But your work focuses on Chicago in its history with bricks. So for you, where does that story start? So before the great fire of Chicago, Chicago is very much a city of wood. We had access to so much wood, so cheap, and that's just what we built everything out of. And then 1871, the city burns down in this unbelievable fire. A third of the city burns. A third of the population becomes homeless. And we really quickly need to start rebuilding.

The good news, though, was Chicago was really perfectly positioned to rebuild with brick. first because we're sitting on this enormous quantity of clay. So 14,000 years ago, Chicago was covered by this enormous glacial lake that dropped all this fine clay across the land. But intermixed in all this clay, there's stones and pebbles and just stuff. And so when Chicago brickmakers started making brick out of that clay, they found the bricks came out looking unbelievably messy and ugly. pink and red and brown with these bleached white bits of limestone on the face and all these pores and stuff that would just soak up so much soot and dirt and turn black over time. And these bricks, which are called Chicago Common Bricks, came to be known as the ugliest bricks

in the entire country for that reason. Yeah, there's a Boston brickmaker in 1892 that's said in an industry speech that if Adam from the Bible had been a brickmaker, he would have caused the fall of man by making a brick as ugly as the thing. those they make in Chicago. Yeah. That's pretty floridly harsh. It is. It led to, it led to a Chicago brickmaker to respond, quote, when Boston can show as fine buildings as Chicago, when Boston can show as many people as Chicago, when Boston can show as much enterprise in Chicago, then we will listen to all the criticisms that Mr. Fistke has to make about the brick in Chicago. You think you better than me? Yeah, I know. We've been, we've always been the second city. We've always

been a city with a chip on our shoulder even when it comes to our bricks. Yeah, so good. With these bricks, they're really ugly. They're considered really ugly, but they're perfectly fine for building. And we can make an enormous quantity of them. Yeah, and we should say something else is happening at the same time as the Great Fire, which is the ability to make bricks at scale just kind of explodes. Right, exactly. Can you talk about that and how we used to make bricks one way and what changed heading into the turn of the century? Yeah. Bricks. for thousands of years were made by hand. Starting from a place of mixing mud and straw and sand together,

baking it in the sun, building what's called a clamp, this big pile of unfired bricks, you know, lit on fire from the inside, like a bonfire, eventually making kilns to fire it, to make it more permanent. And all bricks were coming out in really varied ways when you made bricks that way. One brickmaker who had experience in that said that a good bird, of brick was much more a matter of luck than any kind of skill. It's just what does chemistry do in that time? Yeah, yeah. And all bricks kind of look like in a way that Chicago common brick, really messy, varied. But starting in the 1830s and 1840s in places like Philadelphia and Cincinnati, these machines were invented like pug mills that could grind the clay and make it a really

consistent plastic mass, and then presses that could mechanically do what humans have been doing. press the brick into these molds. And the volume you could make with those machines was staggering. And to give you a sense of how important that is, a really good hand-making brickmaker can make about 5,000 bricks a day. One person can make 5,000 bricks in a day. Yeah, because they've got these molds that are, you know, six, the mold has pockets for six bricks on it.

Okay, okay. Somebody who's really good, you're throwing down clay on that, you're scraping it off, you're dumping them out, and then a child is picking those up to take those, them. And someone who's really good at that can make $5,000 a day at most. These early machines that the Chicago Common manufacturers were using could make $36,000 an hour. Oh, wow. Wow. A huge amount of bricks. And so these are the kind of machines that had been invented in the 1850s, but became perfected and widespread by the Chicago fire. And so when Chicago rebuilds, it is

reborn as a city of brick and out of brick made from the very stuff right under our feet. Yeah. And it's particularly that Chicago common brick. That is what we're building with because they just want to make, they're cranking out this stuff with whatever dirt's around them. Exactly. Exactly. Whatever color it is, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. We need to rebuild the city right now. They don't care, exactly. They don't care what the brick looks like. They just start scooping up clay and making Chicago common brick and they remake the city out of it. It's just an amazing confluence of events. You know, like you have a wood city. It burns down. You have to. and so much of it burns down, you have so much demand that it supports this thing that's already there that's ripe to explode and it does. Yeah, it was really exactly that. It's the perfect way to put it. It was ripe. It was absolutely ready for it, and it could do it, and it did it in a huge, enormous,

enormous way. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of the story, the majesty of bricks comes through in photography, and there's a very evocative image, a very early image in your book, which is a wall, of Chicago Common Brick, which is a big old mess. It is just delightful. So I wonder if you could sort of describe the image for us and what you think it shows about the way these bricks were used to rebuild the city. Yeah, so there's an early image.

It's a wall in South Chicago, far, far south, old steelworking neighborhood. And it's a wall that was never meant to be seen. It was an interior wall of Chicago Common Brick. So when you build a brick building, you've got bricks on the outside, but you have three or four layers thick of brick on the inside. And this building, its neighbor, was torn down, revealing this inner width of brick. And it's all Chicago common brick in this real mess of colors and there's big stones and pebbles.

And then the mortar is so crazy, messy, too. It's just seeping off and oozing out from the wall because it was never meant to be seen. And that's because a lot of those interior walls, those were what the apprentices were first ever allowed to lay as bricks. Oh, wow. And to learn to be a bricklayer, a big part of that is learning to do things in a repetitive way in a way that takes care of your body and you can do consistently. And one guide I have said that you should be able to lay an interior brick with two moves. That's it. And what does that mean?

Throw mortar down, drop a brick on it, and then repeat. And they would often even say, hold two bricks next to each other, butt to butt, in one hand and just put them down two at once. You know, so you're not even putting mortar between every single brick. You're just filling in the wall. This picture really is a beautiful description of what people thought of Chicago common brick. It was totally functional, not meant to be seen or appreciated, just oozing and slapdash, not even really level. Yes, talk about that. Talk about how common brick is used in the sort of average.

Chicago architecture. So most buildings you look at in Chicago, when you look at the front of it, you see one kind of brick. And then when you'd look towards the side, you see that brick on the front ends the second it turns the corner and is replaced by this much messier looking Chicago brick. Because there's two categories of brick when we talk about brick. There's face brick and common brick. Face brick is the nice stuff that goes to the front of your building. Common brick is the stuff that's actually doing a job and hidden away where it's not as much meant to be seen. And in Chicago, all we made was that common brick. All the face brick in Chicago was, for the most part, being imported from elsewhere.

Other cities like Philadelphia, they made both kinds of brick. But you look at a building in Philadelphia, and that difference between the front and the side is so much less jarring that it is here. Yeah. I want to kind of give people a geography of brick. Like different cities had different specialties when it came to brick. Could you describe some of those? Yeah. Brick is so geographic.

And it's all what did the glaciers? leave you thousands and thousands of years ago. So in Chicago, we have a very pebbly, stony clays. You go to St. Louis. You have a very fine, consistent clay that burns to a really lovely red. And so a lot of those reds you see in Chicago in areas like Lincoln Park come from areas like St. Louis. You go to parts of Ohio near around like Canton or western Pennsylvania. You get a lot of what are called fireclays, these clays that have a lot of iron pyrite impurities throughout them that produce these very metallic shining bricks with all these specks and pockmarks across it called iron spot bricks.

The Roby House, Franklin Wright's Roby House, for example, is covered in iron spot bricks. It's my personal favorite kind of brick. Or you go to Texas and a lot of areas down there produce a lovely sort of soft, almost pink brick. You know, Rice University is covered in these lovely soft pinkish brick. And it really varies so much depending on just what were the minerals in your clay. It's a really love, makes it a really lovely thing, especially in Chicago, because we were importing all of our face brick, you can walk around a neighborhood and see on the fronts of buildings, there's Milwaukee, there's St. Louis, there's Ohio, there's Texas, there's North Carolina. It's a little tour of the country just by looking at the front of a building.

Yeah, that is so cool. So I want to talk about the Madadnach again, because one of the things we didn't mention is that, that building is a kind of a perfect example for the changing role of brick in construction. So we said the Menadnach was entirely made of brick. And that's only partially true because a few years later, another wing was added to the building. And that side of the building actually uses a steel frame to hold everything up. Yeah, exactly. So could you talk about that transition from using bricks to steel frame? Yeah. So the south newer wing of the Menadnach, the brick is only decoration. It It has a metal skeleton, and the brick really only exists there to fill in the gaps between these metal structural pieces, the cells of the metal. So there's a lot of common brick in it, but the common brick is only there to fill a gap, and the brick is purely decorative.

It also becomes an important part of fireproofing, where all that metal has to be wrapped in brick or terracotta to help that metal survive a fire if that ever comes along. So the role of a bricklayer changed tremendously in that period of time as brick went from the most important part of a building. You know, these contractors write about how if the bricklayers struck, everything stopped. You couldn't do anything. But once metal took over, the bricklayers become the people who come in and fireproof it. And it becomes almost a form of plaster on the walls, you know, in that way. And it never comes back as a structure on a tall building, you know. And really on buildings over four stories high, something else starts to do the job.

Yeah. And I just find this transition so interesting because, like, for the longest time, bricks were mainly a structural element. Like, they looked good and people cared that they look good. But it really stops being a structural element and becomes just another way to decorate your building at some point. What do you think of that change? Yeah. So brick is this structural and decorative material for so long. but after the Second World War, labor becomes the most expensive part of a building. And a brick's a small unit. And a common brick, a structural brick especially, it's a bunch of small units in these thick walls,

and it takes a person a lot of time to lay all that. And so developers, contractors start to look for a cheaper way to do things, and they find the answer in concrete block, cinder block. A cinder block or a concrete block takes up the same space as about seven bricks. and it can go up in the wall a lot faster. And so that's what people start to do, is they buy concrete. They stop buying common brick,

and the common brick companies start to shut down. And in Chicago, by 1954, there's 10 companies left. By 1964, there's five. And by 1970, there's two. Only two companies remaining, making that Chicago common brick. And by that point, most people are building with concrete.

And the next thing that happens, in 1970, the EPA is formed and the Clean Air Act is passed. And brick companies all across the United States are told, you've got to clean up your emissions. The problem is, most brick companies are using kilns. They have these enclosed ovens. Chicago Common manufacturers are making bricks the same way people made them 2,000 years ago. They are making scov kilns, these piles of unfired bricks that they cover in plaster or in

fired bricks, and then they light on fire from the inside. The analogy I like to use is a traditional kiln is an oven. You take your turkey. You stick to the oven. You turn it on. It's all happening in there. A scov kiln like the Chicago Common Manufacturers used is you take a turkey, you stick it on your countertop. You put a gas jet in the butt.

You cover it in deli meat and you light it on fire. It's cooking the turkey, but it's a seeping, smoking mass. And if you are told you need to clean it up, you basically have to build an oven around it. But if nobody's buying it, you can't afford to do that. Right. And that's what happens. So the first one shuts down in 1974. And then the last one, the American Brick Company, which was in Dulton, Illinois and Munster, Indiana, they shut down in 1981.

And that's, that's it. That's the end of common brick manufacturing, both in Chicago and across the United States. Wow. All brick today is mostly face brick. It exists purely as a decorative material. And a lot of that face brick that exists are now a lot bigger. things like a utility-sized brick, which is four inches by 12 inches, because it fills up the space of the wall a lot faster. Right, when it doesn't need to do anything besides be a surface that looks pretty.

You can make it be anything. It becomes more of an idea than a piece of a structure. And it becomes a statement. The modernists, you know, Mies used a lot of it in particular laid in English bond, this structural pattern, because that's what he believed, if you're going to use brick on a building, you should do is put it in this pattern that evokes structure

because that's the most honest way of expressing a building. And then the architects who are rejecting his work in the 70s and 80s are putting tons of brick on their building to shrink the window size to make it feel more historic, more homey,

or more monumental and permanent. And then the postmodernists use it almost like it's paint and cartoon. They're using a solid red, brick to remind you of the solid red bricks of the 1890s, the 1880s. And that's really how it's evolved since then, is it is less of a building material and more of a design material and an idea and can play act as whatever you want it to be. When you think of a brick building, I mean, you have a larger sort of group to sort of gather from in your head. But when you think, like,

like, what is the perfect type of brick building? Is it a tiny little, you know, cottage in the back, that looks like it could be handmade and sort of like the handmadeness of brick reveals it or is it like something like a school which is like a lot of them are made a brick and they they really connote something with the with its brickness you know yeah i i guess i think a school is a is a really great example because the brick is there for solidity for permanence for the fact that kids are sticky and make a lot of mess and beat things up and the brick can withstand it and because it's part of a legacy you will find the same bricks, and sometimes you'll find the exact same designs in wildly different parts of the city. And Chicago is enormous in a city that is also incredibly segregated with so much

feeling of, oh, no, don't go here, don't go there. But the brick creates these connections. And so the neighborhoods are so different in so many different ways, but there's so much the same about them in so many different ways. And so brick has become a real way for me to create dialogue across the city and encourage people to get out and explore the city in more ways. Yeah, another thing this conversation is making me think of is just like how bricks are easily understood by people. Like on this show, we have to describe steel frame construction like every couple of years just to remind people what's going on inside of a building. But like if you were a child and you were told, you know, make a building, you would essentially

build a brick building. Yeah, exactly. You know what that means. And if you, you wanted to build one as tall as an adenact building, you would make it thick at the bottom, and you would intuitively know to do it that way. And you would intuitively know to start interlocking them together and create that depth and, you know, add in what we call headers, the brick going back into the wall to tie everything together. Yeah, it is a very basic and understandable material. And it just like metaphorically, it persists. We build things brick by brick.

We, you know, if there's a store that's not online, it's called a brick and mortar. I don't know. Like, what do you think of that? It's persistence. And those are metaphors about foundational building, even though, you know, it has not been used as a foundational structural material for quite some time. Yeah. What do you think about the persistence of that idea? It is forever.

It is the oldest human-made building material. We've had it forever. The Chicago Tribune's architecture critic in the 70s, Paul Gap, wrote about one building. The Hyatt was a skyscraper covered in brick. And he said, brick is the anti-machine. It is this material made by people and laid by people. And it's also a material that is made in fire. And it is this interaction of intention.

You make it to look a particular way. But chemistry and accidents have, you know, happens. It's the Bob Ross happy little accidents. And that happens in a brick. But we keep using it, even when you don't have to, because it is such a part of our urban fabric. And it is what is expected. And it speaks to elegance and luxury and permanence and history.

After the break, we talk about the other part of a brick wall. Stay tuned. So we've been talking a lot about bricks, but there are two components to every brick wall. There's brick and then there's mortar. What is the role of mortar in all of this other than just sticking bricks together? Everybody always wants to talk about mortar, and so, yeah, everybody. Mortar is there to serve as a glue, so every brick can attach to its neighbor. But in these old brick buildings, the mortar is there as climate control, as moisture management.

The enemy of all buildings is water. And brick, it's clay. It soaks in water, and it'll stay wet. But historically, the mortar we've used in building was called lime mortar. It's made from quick lime. with burnt limestone, which is a material that is very thirsty. It soaks water. And what that means is when those bricks get wet, when it rains, when it splashes, the mortar will soak and pull the moisture out of that brick. The other great thing with that lime mortar, when you're dealing with these

structural brick buildings, buildings move. When they warm, they grow, when they cruel, they shrink. And it's happening really unevenly throughout that Banadnox six-foot thick wall, the outer layers are moving a lot more than the inner layers, and that flexible lime mortar would move with the wall, but still hold it together. And so mortar sticks your bricks together, but it also moves with your bricks and removes moisture from your wall.

That is unbelievably important. The problem that we've run into is over the last hundred years, people have added cement to mortar because it helps it set faster. And you don't have to repoint it, scrape old off and put in fresh as often because it's stiffer, it's stronger.

Yeah, right, right. Problem is now, it's too strong. A lot of the commercially available brick mortar is stronger than the bricks that it's going to be put on. And so when the building tries to move, it can't. And that mortar is just desperately holding it in place. You know, helicopter parent style. And eventually the tension builds and builds and builds

and it cracks, enormous cracks, all across the face of the wall. And these are the cracks you see outside of an old apartment building or whatever. Exactly. And then when the wall gets wet, that cement mortar has no interest in water. Not looking twice at it, the moisture stays in the bricks, starts to work its way all through your brick wall until it eventually gets to your bedroom, your basement, and all that moisture gets released inside your house. And along the way, winter comes, it freezes and it expands and it cracks the wall, and it's just terrible. I have pictures in the book of these walls where the brick is just this cavity eaten away by water.

And there's this lattice work of hard cement mortar that just remains. And so this isn't like a problem on every brick building. But like you said, if you live in an older brick structure, these are the problems that cement mortar can have on your bricks. Yeah. I mean, we've designed modern buildings. Modern buildings are built with cavity walls and weeps and expansion joints. are basically built-in ready-made cracks. And so you can use the modern mortar.

And that's what Mason's are so comfortable with. The problem comes then, masons are so comfortable working with that. And lime mortar is tricky to work with. Pure lime mortar takes like over a month to set fully. And they think, oh, well, this works for this, this works for that. And they go in and they put it on historic homes. It's the sad thing that a lot of Mason's don't know they're causing damage.

And homeowners really don't know what the mortar is doing at all. I don't blame homeowners in any of this. As a homeowner, you get three quotes and all the Masons are telling you roughly the same thing. And so you say, I guess I'll go with this. Well, this is so much fun. I really, really am just inspired by your whole project of everything you're doing for Brick in Chicago. And I just really enjoy the book and enjoy talking with you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I love the podcast. It's an honor to be here. Will Quam is the founder of Brick of Chicago. You can follow him on Instagram at Brick of Chicago. 99% Invisible was produced and edited this week by Jason DeLeon, with additional production by Jackson Roach. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real.

Fact-checking by Graham Hesha. Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Kurt Colestead is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barubei, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashemadon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Tallin and Rain Stradley, and Me, Roman Mars.

The 99% of its logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as their own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.