Bricks are pixels of civilization; they have been stacking one by one -there is no other way- since Mesopotamia and throughout history. Cities all over the world have adopted this construction system to organize the territory and, in other cases, inhabitants appropriate it to organically reorder -disorder- ways of inhabiting.
Bricks shape countries: for example, Holland is a country proud of its clay blocks and even installs them in the ground to facilitate the installation of underground cables and pipes. In Colombia, in the 1950s, the Dutch mission and Sena favored a pedagogy towards productivity increases with the execution of structural masonry (1). It is then when Colombia adopts bricks as a material that homogenizes the urban landscape in all social strata.
Medellín has great examples of brick construction, such as the Vasquez and Carré buildings, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Gutenberg building, the Víctor building, among others. There are also a large number of self-managed constructions made with bricks produced in almost all the city's slopes, which have given it that warm color that characterizes it.
Ladrillera Ð Antioquia, by Luciano Denver, takes as an example a building that is a symbol of brick construction, the Municipal Palace of Medellín, now the Museum of Antioquia, which represents an entire region. It deconstructs it through digital image manipulation and reveals to us how civilization is randomly constructed. In other words, it teaches us what we are made of.
El curriculum vitae del ladrillo, Hernando Vargas Caicedo, engineer from the University of Los Andes* 01/27/05
Text: Alejandro Vásquez, Director of the Paul Bardwell Gallery"
