19th century brick façades between craft and industrialization: Towards an onsite reading of traces.
Brick facades are one of the characteristic ingredients of 19th century architecture. They became ubiquitous during the period. The spread of visible brick and the development of heat-insulating façade claddings are intimately connected to the industrialization of the brick production, providing new moulding techniques such as extrusion, and new products such as hollow bricks. The present article presents the main steps of innovation, based on a review of contemporary technical literature, and establishes the direct link to traces which can be observed on site, providing necessary information for a first assessment, coarse dating and structural hypothesis on the basis of a visual inspection.