There is an idea sometimes encountered in modern architectural teaching and theory that it is somehow inauthentic or ‘fake’ to put more design effort, expense or ‘weight’ into the facade of a building than into the other sides; indeed, that a building shouldn’t even have a recognisably dominant side, but should rather be regarded and designed as a sculpture whose full profundity can only be grasped by a 360 degree walkaround. The paradigmatic example would be a building like Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel.

Traditional buildings in such parklike settings, in contrast, whether cathedrals or country mansions, were always designed with a recognisable front. It was considered self-evident that buildings should have ‘faces’ just as people do, where expression and character are concentrated.

At any rate, sites that allow buildings to sit visually unencumbered by any neighbouring structures have always been relatively rare, and are almost nonexistant in urban residential neighbourhoods. There is nothing inauthentic about putting more design time and money into a street facade, for example by using more expensive timber-framed windows only in the facade, and cheaper aluminium framed windows elsewhere. In fact, the classing of bricks into ‘common’ or ‘face’ varieties arose from this practice of favouring the front: the finest, most uniform and blemish-free bricks were graded ‘face’ quality, for use in the facade, and the rest ‘common,’ to be used on the back and sides of the building. Though the terms face and common brick survive to this day, the consistency of modern brick manufacturing has made the distinction almost meaningless, and the colour variation and visual interest displayed by ‘common’ brick is ironically often regarded as equally if not more attractive than the perfection and uniformity of ‘face’ brick, and used over the entire house.

The desire to give a building a pretty face should not be understood merely as an aesthetic custom or preference. It also has deeper social importance- it is a gesture to the street, and by extension symbolic of a willingness to engage with the public realm and the community.

Traditionally, brick chimneys bricklayers a chance to show off their skills and creativity, without being too showy about it: chimneys are prominent on the building silhouette and visible from the street, but only if you make the effort to look up. Brick chimneys and fireplaces have almost disappeared from new house builds, reflecting the change over the years from coal or wood heating to gas and now split systems. Where new houses have chimneys at all, they are much more likely to be a simple steel pipe with a cowl, connected to a freestanding woodburning stove. But even before this transformation, the Great Scold modernism had stripped the ornament from chimneys as it had from all brickwork, and by the 1960s and 70s most brick chimneys were simple undecorated cuboids.

Who would be a bricklayer today? Nothing but course after course of stretcher bond veneer, with the occasional soldier course over a lintel if you’re lucky. Predictably, modern architects show almost no interest in the endless possibilities presented by the traditional language of brick masonry: bonds, cornices, string courses, arches, colour patterns, ‘special bricks’. Instead there is only stretcher bond, or at the other extreme, attention-seeking gimmicks such as incorporating text into the wall, or Frank Gehry-style ‘parametric’ brickwork- in its way just as mechanical and monotonous as stretcher bond, but somehow supposedly ‘clever’.

Below are a few photos of brick chimneys from the 19th and early 20th centuries, all taken within an area of a few blocks. They range from barely ornamented examples on weatherboard workers’ cottages to more elaborate displays featuring multiple colours and special brick shapes. As is typical of vernacular architecture, they are all more or less the same, and at the same time all different.