A local pizza eatery has some brick arches in the eating area (pics). I’ve always wondered how the arches were built. Did they use a vertical wooden form, and lay the bricks atop it? Or perhaps the arches were made on the ground (using a form), and then the whole arch was pivoted upwards after the mortar cured.
When I have seen this done they build a form and build it in place.
I think that you can buy ready made arch forms or make them from timber and ply. If they wanted to build more than a couple, it would be cheaper to pre-fabricate them with the bricks, or maybe with a concrete core and brick facings. I also wonder whether a freestanding arch like that would be strong enough without some internal reinforcement.
Constructing an arch like that in situ would need a skilled bricklayer. If you look at the bricks, they are specially shaped and likely came as a kit from the brickworks.
Ordinarily I’d say “built in place” - but there’s something a bit too precise about these, and the number of them makes me further suspicious. I would suspect they are lightweight fakes (using the thin brick facing and corners) built in a shop somewhere and then installed in the restaurant. I’d have to look closely and knock on 'em to be sure either way.
ETA: Salad tongs at dawn, ninja Bob++!
It’s done with a form. It’s feasible to build a small enough arch and set the pieces one at a time with mortar, but it’s risky for a simple arch. Here’s a photo of my pizza oven, I used a foam mold to hold the bricks while the mortar dried. It’s incredible how strong it feels as you apply pressure towards the sides, and then when you drop in the keystone it is strong and solid. The oven itself is a dome. I used a foam mold for that also, but others have done it just using clamps to hold the bricks in place while the mortar sets, and I should have done that so that I could have kept the interior cleaner. With the dome after the first brick is laid in a course each one after that then has two points of contact reducing the risk of collapse before the course is completed. When a course is completed it will be very strong since each brick is supported by two adjacent ones.
That looks like the work of a skilled mason. There’s no unusual precision or any reason to think otherwise.
Title edited to indicate subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
back in older times people would apprentice to learn a trade. before schooling and labor laws people would start on the job when they were children and teens.
so a mason would have a large selection of people of various heights to hold the bricks in place until the arch was completed.
Ok, I gotta ask you for a source on that. It just sounds silly.
The bricks seem a bit too shiny and the mortar is too precisely finished. I’ll concede it could be masonry. I’d bet one wooden nickel it’s something else.
I have no idea what you are talking about. They look like bricks, the joints are uneven, it’s not even the best job I’ve seen done by a mason. It could be some kind of manufactured material instead of real bricks, or even a prefab unit of some kind, but I fail to see why something like that would be used to replace 2 to 3 hours of work by a mason using very inexpensive bricks.
The only thing I find curious are the bricks on the interior of the arch, the exposed ends are all about the same color while the sides vary. That would only indicate some kind of extruded material and not a standard fired clay brick.
ETA: I haven’t enlarged the image beyond my screen size or spent a lot time on this either. There’s more than one arch shown, if you can find a pattern duplicated I’ll send you a wooden nickel.
Some of them eight or ten or twelve feet tall. What did you think “There were giants in the earth in those days” meant besides mason’s helpers?
My problem with a free standing arch like this is that it is just too easy to push over. An arch is very strong in compression but a sideways impact would easily cause serious injuries if it fell down.
I agree, also for liability & cost issues. If those are solid brick throughout they’d be very heavy (and expensive). And masonry is vulnerable to catastrophic failure (it can all come down at once with little warning). I think they’re rebar-reinforced and/or possibly hollow, prefab, poured concrete forms with brick facing.
Hehehe…
Originally, albeit away back, I always thought anything brick like walls along side walks, etch, were awesome-solid brick. Then, a car hit a wall and the inside was hollow with metal studs providing the structure!
I’m sure those arches came in a kit, to help with the build time, and to be lighter in weight, possibly defer some degree of liability if someone were to knock it over.
Quite possibly, like electronbee says. I’ve seen arches and entire brick walls that were actually just façades. The structure consists of a poured concrete wall (in the case of a wall) or a modern post-and-lintel “arch” with a superstructure of lath and plaster and chickenwire, all of which was finally overlayed with a realistic-looking (as long as you didn’t look too close) brick-work façade.
No, I don’t think those are real, solid brick and mortar arches. I’ve seen what a Theater Arts major can do with foam, a knife, paint, brushes, and sponges.
Nah, you can get that by using cheap bricks made from low-quality clay (low-quality simply in including multiple colors) and selecting which ones to use where. I’m now wondering where we have the pictures of The Wall That Wasn’t Going To Fall Down (and which fell down the night after the first part of the pics were taken): a lot of the bricks had different colors in different sides, and yet the brick factory they came from can be seen from that same terrace on which that wall was built.
The prefab arches are mostly concrete, but as per their own descriptions they get the brick effect by using bricks.
Ranger Jeff, those are in a restaurant. I don’t think the theater arches are supposed to stay in place and look good for years without touch-ups.
The traditional way of building these arches is indeed to set up a wooden frame, lay the bricks on it starting on either end and building your way inwards. The whole structure wouldn’t support itself until the last stone at the top and centre of the structure, they keystone, is placed; afterwards, you remove the frame. This is called centring and is different from a corbelled arch, where you lay horizontal lines of bricks such that each line will jut forward a little further than the line below, until you reach the desired structure. Corbelled arches are older than true, circular arches built with a wooden frame, because they’re easier to build; but true arches are statically superior because the weight of the structure which it supports is transmitted into the ground.
This is, of course, how such arches were built historically. Whether it applied to your specific example is a different question.
I’d put my money (if I had any!) on them being fake, but they do photograph well…
(where have I read that before?)
Do we know the name of the restaurant? and when you go back there to knock test them, might want to avoid that rim of black growth around the base bricks!
(Could it be something else? some sort of spray adhesive overspray? or just the result of a wet mop being dragged around nightly?)