WHAT IS THIS? SOME SORT OF CONCLUSION!

What do you get when you cross five overly ambitious design students and a dirty practice which none of them are familiar with? One middling, charmingly crooked mud brick wall. Prior to embarking on this journey of self-discovery, they did not quite know what to expect. 

They studied precedents set to give themselves a better idea of the many ways the material can be applied to achieve different effects. They found examples of ancient Syrian architecture and of modern-day ­adobe and used these to inform their designs.

Digging holes is always easier to talk about than to do. They obviously didn’t expect blisters and cuts, as none of the crew had the foresight to wear gloves, or in fact anything that resembled PPE. It was clear from the outset that they had never done this before, even their postures looked out of place and they carried themselves in a way not normally attributed to your average brick-layer. Their rudimentary knowledge of the intricacies of OH&S was clear as they discovered new ways to wield a shovel, a hammer and even found a new and innovative use for a paint stirrer.

At the beginning of construction, they were slow and meticulous, calculating every millimetre of every brick and of every spirit level bubble. This could not hold. It would not hold. They pushed themselves beyond their sedentary norms, but with the stamina expected of a 200lb career smoker, the crew was well and truly done with it by the late afternoon. And then with their bodies all but broken, the crew was finished. They had won. Before them stood a monument to their hard work and perseverance. And though she wasn’t pretty, there was an overwhelming sense of pride, of relief.

The omission of the bonding agent or any sort of finish was a choice that would show during the water test. It was a sacrifice made in order to directly recycle the bricks immediately after construction. They would be used in a future landscaping project on the same site they were built.

They would eat their chips and drink their Coke Zero, which by the way tastes nothing like real Coke. They were content with their efforts, exhausted but unbeaten. They made the most of their strengths and identified and overcame their weaknesses, this was a task that they each could not have accomplished on their own. It was a shining example of how five people, from different political and cultural backgrounds, with different hearts and different minds can come together to achieve a common goal. I guess people just work better together than they do apart.

Text by Bradley Byrne

Photos by Alex Thomas and Melina Vlastou