Think Brick Awards celebrate best designs of the year in a classic building material

Made of earthy stuff, brick is so back in the picture of high architecture it is showing up hard-handed bricklayer tradies as brilliant craftspersons — if not as artists — whose work could endure in the open air for hundreds of years.

At the 11th annual Think Brick Awards in Melbourne on Thursday, the five winning projects deploy bricks and mortar to create pattern, colour and texture that so intrigues the eye it adds up to blatantly beautiful effects.

And after decades of rendered blue board and fast build, tilt panel plainness, that’s an outcome we should endorse, because these are buildings that could be keepers.

That’s precisely what the richest of Australia’s many architecture awards – winners in each of the five categories receives $10,000 — has been championing since in 2005 when, with only 25 entries, it started the awards to promote the scope of brick, concrete masonry and roof tiles.

Now hundreds of practises contest the competition to exemplify the fun they’re having exploring highly original applications of bricks and roof tiles.

The rear extension of a Sydney family house by Tribe Studio, which won the Horbury Hunt Residential Award, projected a brick roof gable above a wide open garden pavilion-style kitchen/living rear addition.

Using five different brick types in a complex composition that had masonry laid in verticals, horizontals and beneath the gable apex, as a “starburst”, House Au Yeung paid homage not only to its 1930s frontage, but as Hannah Tribe explained, “to the characterful houses with terracotta rooves and decorative gables” in its immediate vicinity.

In the monolithic structure on the beachfront that replaced the concrete cancer-suffering 1970s Kempsey Crescent Head Surf Life Saving Club, Sydney’s Neeson Murcutt Architects chose brick for the walls of the cranked and cantilevered form but finessed the effect by making the colourations of the glazed bricks so soft and palely pretty.

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The inspiration for brickwork that tonally spreads or contracts across the surfaces came from Pipi shells collected on the beach by Rachel Neeson’s daughter. As lovely as those walling effects are, the practise won the Robin Dods Roof Tile Excellence Award for the way glazed ceramic tiles tonally tie the roof to the building.

In Melbourne, Make Architecture’s Perimeter House in Abbotsford presents to the pavement as a matter-of-fact two tone building of lower level white brickwork and an upper level roof walkway bounded with a hit-and-miss weaving of charcoal brickwork.

But this lovely house that won the Kevin Borland Masonry Award, and that has brick inside, outside, around the pool and as the curving banks of garden beds, unfolds as a holistic program of masonry-defined spaces. The emphasis on brick was about relating a residential “oasis” to a neighbourhood of old brick warehouses and factories.

Fantastic as a valuable variation on the middle-density townhouse theme is KUD, or Kavellaris Urban Design’s, luxury townhouse row in Melbourne’s East Hawthorn. A practise always up to challenge the conventional, KUD won the Horbury Hunt Commercial Award for the cluster of uniformly gabled units that, the judges decided, “boast unique external facades and elaborate feature brickwork patterns within the interior of each home”.

Not only engaging of itself, the brick laying is always making surface texture that, according to KUD, is always “interacting with daylight”.

The final dwelling, Crescent House by Queensland practise Deicke Richards, won the Bruce Mackenzie Landscape award for the way brick has been used to create an external topography to link a series of crafted spaces back to the dwelling.

Elizabeth McIntyre, chief executive of Think Brick Australia, noted the increasing trend of masonry being used to unify indoor and outdoor areas. “But one of the main trends we noted in the entries was an increase in the use of brick in interiors.”

Across the board, she said, “this year’s inspiring entries have really pushed the boundaries of contemporary architecture”.

www.thinkbrick.com.au/think-brick-awards