Darkly colored brick brings automatic elegance and a bit of attitude to building designs. Contrasting light-colored mortars make for a James-Bond-in-a-tuxedo look, while mortars tinted to match black or dark gray brick deliver an exotic, monolithic Bond-villain feel. Both mixes can be applied to many styles, but contemporary designs tend be where black and dark gray brick really shine.

If a picture paints a thousand words, then picture perfect paver projects need little more than a photo gallery to demonstrate how fired clay brick pavers are the ideal material for your design in hardscape. From streets to sidewalks to communal outdoor spaces, brick pavers deliver vibrancy in color, shape, and texture that is unmatched by any copycat material. And since they come with the same legendary durability of brick in the wall, you can expect those colors, shapes, and textures to endure far into the future.

For the technical stuff, click the buttons below to access excellent resources about brick pavers from the Brick Industry Association (BIA). Otherwise, just kick back and enjoy the gallery.

There’s been a resurgence in beautiful brick baseball stadiums in the last few decades. Oriole Park at Camden Yards was the first high profile ballpark to bring back the old-time charm of baseball venues, calling on brick as a major component. Since then many other newly-constructed stadiums have put brick’s design flexibility to work using a variety of new and old styles, but keeping the “it just feels right” character of brick at the center of their designs.

Minor League ballpark, Hodgetown, in Amarillo, Texas, puts a new-old spin on brick ballparks by incorporating a Midwest art deco style. Designers from Populous built a park that emulated the feel of adjacent downtown Amarillo, kicking off a new phase of revitalization for the area.

It’s that time again. The Brick Industry Association (BIA) is accepting entries into its annual design competition. If you are an architect or designer who’s firm completed a great project done in at least 50% clay brick over the last several years, you should definitely enter the Brick in Architecture Awards. Here are three reasons why.

Brick cavity wall design places a single wythe of brick on the facade of a building and backs it up with a supportive structure of wood or steel studs, concrete masonry units, or some other load bearing skeleton. Between that structure and the brick veneer is an air space of one or more inches that allows any water that penetrates the veneer to flow harmlessly down the back side of the brick to the building’s foundation.

But what happens then? Why does the air space not fill up with water like a tiny but disproportionately deep swimming pool? The key to making the cavity wall system work is a small, unnoticed, and disrespected feature of modern brick construction: weeps.

Form follows function. It’s a well known design principle, but in the case of the Fitts-Woolard hall on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University, the form is the function.