Where Old Bricks Go

For years, I have delighted in finding the debris of old buildings resurfacing along the shores of a local river like the remnants of some lost civilization. Over a century ago, the river was reengineered to change the course of the stream as part of a restoration project. Buildings along the river were demolished to create parkland, and the building materials from the demolition was used for fill to build up the new riverbanks. A hundred years of erosion is now bringing the broken bits of those old buildings back to light. 

Yet as fascinating as it can be for people like me to find old bricks peeking out of the dirt, using them as fill seems like a sorry fate for beautiful building materials. When the region was filled with brick factories and environmental concerns had barely started to emerge (river restoration notwithstanding), using the material as fill within the project area was probably excellent economies.

Reclaimed bricks can be a high efficiency solution that can also be surprisingly cost effective. Especially if architecturally interesting bricks can be reused, there can be savings over new specialty bricks. Obviously, we can't cannibalize our old buildings to meet all our construction needs, but when it is necessary to clear the way for new buildings, we should look for the opportunities to reduce our impact and improve the quality of our architecture through the creative reuse of the materials we have already invested the time and effort to produce. 

 Today, recycling bricks from building demolition is a common practice. That is to say, the bricks are crushed and used as fill material. It is better than dumping them into a landfill, but there is a tremendous loss of efficiency for all the resources needed to produce new bricks or alternative building materials. A more circular economy would find ways to reuse the material at a lower cost and higher sustainability.

I will be particularly interested to see what happens with these bricks from the Lincoln Tunnel after nearly a century of use in their original site. Hopefully they become the material for new, imaginative creations instead of washing up in the river or becoming a base of compacted gravel.