- see main article Brick Expressionism
The term Brick Expressionism (German: Backsteinexpressionismus) describes a specific variant of expressionism that uses bricks, tiles or clinker bricks as the main visible building material. Buildings in the style were erected mostly in the 1920s. The style's regional centres were the larger cities of Northern Germany and the Ruhr area, but the Amsterdam School belongs to the same category.
Amsterdam's 1912 cooperative-commercial Scheepvaarthuis (Shipping House), is considered the starting point and prototype for Amsterdam School work: brick construction with complicated masonry, traditional massing, and the integration of an elaborate scheme of building elements (decorative masonry, art glass, wrought-iron work, and exterior figurative sculpture) that embodies and expresses the identity of the building. The School flourished until about 1925.
The great international fame of German Expressionism is not related to German Brick Expressionist architects, but to German Expressionist painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Vasily Kandinsky and his German friends in Munich around 1908, and so on.
Read more about this topic: Expressionist Architects
Famous quotes containing the word brick:
“Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)