“The brick is the yardstick and the measure of the great Empires.” With these words, Patrick Boucheron, the French historian who studies cities and power, describes the brick’s lasting role in shaping civilizations.
The statement sounds grand, almost rhetorical, but it has firm roots in history. Consider first-century Rome, built on a fabric of bricks later covered in shining marble to express both the solidity and the splendour of the empire. Yet the brick has never remained locked in the past.
Modest and familiar, it continues to pose questions and offer insights about society, technology, art, and even the environment. This awareness forms the basis of What do you want, Brick?, the exhibition now on view at Grand-Hornu in Belgium, which examines the past, present, and potential future of a material as simple as it is layered with meaning.
The title quotes Louis Kahn, the twentieth-century architect who liked to ask the brick a question both plain and revealing: “What do you want?” For Kahn, every material has a voice, a latent intent, a form waiting to be uncovered. The exhibition takes up this challenge, seeking to listen to the brick and let it speak on its own terms, without imposed narratives, to discover what it tells us about the world around it.
The exhibition unfolds as a narrative in three parts, each offering a different perspective on the material. The first focuses on the brick’s constructive and decorative dimensions. It is the aspect closest to everyday experience, instantly recognizable in the architecture of cities, in the walls of houses and factories, in barriers that both divide and embellish.
The show illustrates how the brick is not merely a structural unit but also a means of creating visual patterns, perforated surfaces, and plays of light and shadow. A simple change in the position, shape, or colour of bricks can transform a wall from a basic boundary into a visual story, speaking the language of art as much as that of engineering.
Beyond the beauty of façades, however, the brick carries a more hidden and increasingly urgent dimension: its environmental impact. This forms the focus of the second part of the exhibition. Whether crafted by hand or produced industrially, brickmaking has always been deeply tied to the land, reliant on the local availability of clay and earth. Historically, entire communities grew around kilns, forging strong economic and cultural identities. Yet today, in a world grappling with the climate crisis, there is growing debate about whether the brick can still be considered a sustainable material.
The third part of the exhibition opens onto more radical territory, where design goes beyond reimagining the brick’s shape or aesthetic language and begins to rethink its very substance, venturing into collaborations with living matter. Here, the brick becomes an experimental ground where the boundary between natural and artificial, between human design and biological processes, grows increasingly thin.
Some designers look to biology not only for formal inspiration but as a true production partner. Termite mounds transformed into raw material, mycelium cultivated to shape objects, soils enriched with natural enzymes — all of this takes place in a laboratory where design meets material science and the principles of environmental regeneration. It is research that questions the rules of traditional industry, proposing processes that are slower, more organic, and interdependent.
In this part of the exhibition, the perspective of design is not merely about creating objects but about shaping entire systems of more sustainable production.
The chairs, bricks, and experimental pieces on display act as manifestos for a single idea: that design can collaborate with life itself, growing and transforming over time. It is an approach that overturns conventional production logic, replacing industrial repetition with natural variability and opening the door to a way of designing in which even a brick can become a living organism.
In this vision, the brick is no longer only the module supporting the architecture of the world but a symbol of how design can become a tool for rethinking our relationship with resources, nature, and the future.
- Exhibition: What do you want, Brick?
- Venue: CID – Centre d’Innovation et de Design, Écuries, Grand-Hornu, Hornu (Belgium)
- Dates: 25 May 2025 – 28 September 2025
- Curator: Caroline Naphegyi
- Exhibition design: Marie Douel
- Website: www.cid-grand-hornu.be
