Brick Anything: Grades 3-5
Sat, May 17
|National Building Arts Center
A brick is made of material bodies — sand, clay, and water. "Brick Anything" is an invitation to consider how we coexist with materials in a shared environment. Workshop will be co-facilitated by artists Lynne Smith and Abby Flannagan. Materials and a light snack will be provided.
Time & Location
May 17, 2025, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
National Building Arts Center, 2300 Falling Springs Rd, Sauget, IL 62206, USA
About the event
Building materials are deeply tied to place and process. The geology of a region influences its materials and architecture. The Mississippi River Valley was ideal for brickmaking: it offered generous deposits of sand, land with distinctive red clay, and a river system that provided water and transportion. The prized red brick was used in many of St. Louis’s buildings, and was shipped on barges to cities like Savannah, Chicago, and New York.
Understanding where materials come from gives us a deeper connection to the land and the earth’s finite resources. It takes thousands, even millions of years for rivers to erode the stone that deposits sand in river basins and beaches. Today, machines pump materials, such as clay, into molds for uniformity and efficiency; very few things we buy are made by hand. This project asks, what else can a brick-size unit of clay become when sculpted by hand?