To be clear: these are prefab brick panels, as they are going up in one piece. The seams, the lack of a lintel, and the dangling chokers (as per member 'whatever') are clues to this. A sighting of the panels arriving intact on a flatbed truck confirms it.

FlorianP1200400.jpg


A question remains: are they necessarily precast as opposed to possibly preassembled? (Can you preassemble a panel of bricks then successfully move them without damage?) If they are "just" precast, they are the best precast bricks we have ever seen, with very convincing individual colouration.

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They do look very convincing, though the seams between panels are a little distracting. Hopefully the "masons" here will work their magic, and hide them to some degree.
 
It's not so much the seam as it is that the panels seem to bulge out slightly. Hopefully that's an optical illusion.
 
Rumour in the industry has it that these are in fact real bricks, however, they have been pre-cast into panels which allow for the type of installation you see here. This is an extremely expensive way of installing a brick veneer but preffered over the faux brick precast panels. Faux precast brick panels of the past are little more than concrete which has been poured into a brick mold and painted to look like brick which, and dont get me wrong, can look good when done correcctly.

We should expect to see more installations like this seeing as its getting harder and harder to find a mason who can tackle these jobs and not make a complete mess of it.
 
I'd be curious to know how the panels were made then, because mortar isn't exactly an adhesive. If those are loose bricks then they'd need something to support the bottom or else they'd all fall out. Unless they did something really weird like cast hangers into the bricks and then set the hangers into the precast, but that would be so labour intensive that it seems cost prohibitive.

That's sort of how stone gets mounted into curtainwall (obviously not casting in hangers, but hangers nonetheless), but in that case you're dealing with maybe two or three pieces of stone per panel so it's an altogether different matter than doing a few hundred tiny little bricks per panel.
 
whatever said:
I'd be curious to know how the panels were made then, because mortar isn't exactly an adhesive. If those are loose bricks then they'd need something to support the bottom or else they'd all fall out. Unless they did something really weird like cast hangers into the bricks and then set the hangers into the precast, but that would be so labour intensive that it seems cost prohibitive.

That's sort of how stone gets mounted into curtainwall (obviously not casting in hangers, but hangers nonetheless), but in that case you're dealing with maybe two or three pieces of stone per panel so it's an altogether different matter than doing a few hundred tiny little bricks per panel.
Click to expand...

No mortar, all concrete. Follow this link to see how one manufacturer makes their real brick precast panels. You'll get a much better idea of how its done. http://http://www.pci.org/pdf/publications/ascent/2007/Winter/AS-07WI-6.pdf
 
Thanks for the link, very informative. Actually seems like it has a lot of potential. It would certainly allow for the reintroduction of masonry (or masonry-like appearance) into contemporary design vernacular. That could have been used to great effect on a tower like Uptown
 
That's pretty neat! I think those prefabricated brick panels in particular would be best suited on a podium up to 6-7 storeys in height, but given the creativity afforded, there can definitely be some other neat designs for a tower.
 
The debate here has been about using real brick vs precast fake brick panels.

What the real debate should be--does it look good? The answer is a resounding YES!!!

Compare to the "real" (concrete brick coloured pinkish red imo) brick used on Heintzmann Place--totally appalling garbage.
 
That's not what the debate has been about. Everyone agrees these look great, we're just getting more info on how they have been assembled. Yumpin yiminy.
 
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