Brick veneer houses, they are a classic modern Australian house typology, and are as culturally ingrained on the Melbourne collective psyche as vegemite sandwiches.
The classic fable of the story of the house built of sticks gets blown away, but a brick house is solid and will keep us safe. By looking backwards with clarity rather than with rose-tinted glass and understanding the resilience of these houses, we can all walk forward using the lessons learnt from time. The current trend to build more from lighter and thinner cladding materials seems entirely counterintuitive.
Historically, in Australian housing after the war, there was a massive population boom which required more houses faster and cheaper. Before this period, the dream of an owner was solid brick construction, where the structure and dressing of the house were one. It was appreciated for its resilience and thermal comfort.
The dream of the brick house came from an understanding of the resilience and appropriateness to the climate. Heating through open fires was available but no such cooling technologies existed. Which meant houses were built to survive the local conditions and were built using material that worked and played with thermal mass to create a comfortable environment indoors.
Thermal mass of course is the capacity of a material to absorb, store, and gradually release heat, thereby moderating indoor temperature fluctuations. In a typical brick veneer house, as the sun heats the exterior throughout the day, the bricks absorb the warmth and slowly release it as the temperature drops, creating a naturally regulated indoor climate.
During the boom period, the advancement of timber housing was becoming known as well as a ready supply of imported and local timber. Here the construction industry creates a happy marriage of convenience between a house with a timber frame which was cheap, efficient and fast to build and the cultural norm of a solid brick house by using the brick only in dressing the house as its facade.
With brick veneer construction, where the brick is not structural and replaceable. When we create something like this, whose purpose is misunderstood and can be seen only as a dressing that is entirely replaceable by cheaper materials of course, we all know what happens. The brick has been replaced by alien materials that make no sense to this environment.
There’s a reason when you look at warmer climates like Queensland the houses are open ventilated and lightweight to bring in the breeze and shelter from the sun. The climate there is humid with mild temperature fluctuations between night and day. Ventilation is king there. The lighter materials are entirely purposeful in this climate as they keep the rain out and need to do little else. In the Melbourne climate where there are dramatic temperature differences between day and night these lighter materials are non sensical. They keep the weather out and rely almost entirely on the insulation within the wall to stop the heat or cold entering the house.
The traditional heavier cladding on brick in a Melbourne climate perfectly complements the climatic conditions of Melbourne.
The bright spot here is that recent movement in the construction standards are starting to recognise this Unsung invisible hero in a small way . As strange as it is to say as an architect, hopefully we learn from ideas of thermal comfort from these single glazed, uninsulated, leaky brick veneer homes of the past.