Like breathing bricks and other stories

Like breathing bricks and other stories

by Andrej Chudy

When I won my first bricklaying competition my mother has built a massive brick house just to show off the trophy to the world. I dedicate this book to her.

“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”

- David Brickley

Contents Foreword

5

Prologue

6

A short story about Jennifer Aniston

10

Relationship with a brick

17

Window tax conspiracy

37

Like breathing bricks

86

Berlin brick buildingsroman I

274

Foreword My family has been always close to the bricks and we loved telling each other brick-related stories which included photographic illustrations. I have decided to collect some of these stories just to share their beauty.

Even though to uninitiated it could seem that this theme is quite limited, but as I hope you’ll find out these stories are very different from each other:

• A short story about Jennifer Aniston seems like a simple memory but carries a strong learning.

• Relationship with a brick is based on a relationship advice column for a newspaper and discusses if it’s possible to fall in love with a brick.

• Window tax conspiracy is an academic essay / conspiracy theory about the origin and legacy of window tax.

• Like breathing bricks is a memoir by the inventor of smart bricks.

• Berlin brick buildingsroman I is an introspective coming of age tale about escaping a cult and opening up.

I hope you’ll enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed collecting them.

Andrej

Prologue

Prologue I have a recurring dream. I am walking in an endless brick tunnel.

The brick walls are watching me

In the end of the tunnel there is a tall door and I know that if I am to walk through the door I will become the craftiest mason.

A short story about Jennifer Aniston

A Short Story About Jennifer Anniston I have a short story about Jennifer Aniston to tell, but first let me show you something. You see this wall that finished too soon? In our practice we see things like this and worse every day when we are asked to fix botched jobs. How can you deliver a wall to client and say: “Sorry we ran out of bricks, so we made the end from stray pieces of wood.�

“Sorry, I have made the left side a bit wavy, I just felt like it and went with the flow.�

“Sorry, I have put the entry to your house in the air, I was looking on the project documentation from the wrong side.�

I am not saying mistakes don’t happen at our studio. But we’ve got best practice methods in place for every project, from straightforward walls to complex brick surrealism.

We’ve got a network of field agents doing proactive brickwork surveillance.

I got a bit sidetracked there, but now back to the story. Couple of years ago I have read this quote by Jennifer Aniston: “People who avoid the brick walls - all power to ya, but we all have to hit them sometimes in order to push through to the next level, to evolve.”

I couldn’t help myself and I have invited her to our shop. When I was showing her around she saw this wall and suddenly she launched herself into air and hit it straight on. She was quite surprised to find out that there was a wall behind the wall. We have left the wall like this as a reminder, that sometimes to evolve you don’t have to hit the wall, but to build a second wall.

Relationship with a brick

Someone asked me recently: “Can you have a relationship with a brick?�

Let me start my answer with two archival photos. This is Eija-Riitta Wallis Winther Arja Nikki Lee Eklöf who on 17th June 1979, just after six dates, has married the Berlin Wall. For her this iconic wall has been the „best and sexiest wall [that] ever existed“. After the demolition of the wall she never seen “him” again and she got into a relationship with garden fence.

[Source of photos: Getty. Eija-Riitta posing with a model of The Berlin Wall.]

Some walls are just so precious.

Overwhelming and addictive at the same time, [I have taken this photo trying to achieve the same composition as the photographer for Claire Curtice Publicists.]

with the most striking smile.

Flashy, with all the jewelery on facade to attract your eye.

Secretive, using facade to protect hidden beauty.

Giving you mysterious looks,

with plenty of stories to tell.

“I’ll tell you a raunchy story if you shoo that bird from my head.”

Research has proven that well designed brick walls promote release of endorphins. Just look at this beautiful wall. I bet it will make somebody smile in a second.

A wall gives you support like no human can.

There she goes, smiling, by courtesy of the radiating brick pattern.

Wall will continue to support you even if your self esteem drops so low that you start thinking of yourself just as a bunch of old disjointed wheels.

Bricks truly are life.

Bricks nurture life. Build a small brick wall and soon you’ll have a triangle of life.

Build a brick house and soon you’ll have a sprawling ecosystem.

Brick walls are like unconditional love that creates safe spaces both on the inside and outside.

In conclusion: Yes, you can have a relationship with a brick wall. But be aware, that you might totally lose your head as bricks can give you much more than a mere mortal could provide.

Window tax conspiracy

I am on the way from brick hunt in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Occitanie, and Catalunya. For all the brick lovers I must recommend Girona, it’s tremendously beautiful and inspiring. Same goes for Montserrat, Avignon, Barcelona, and Carcassonne. Unfortunately my compact camera got stolen quite late into the trip (I have made a very basic tourist mistake) so I’ve got just very few photos to share.

I suspect it was stolen by my competition but if not I hope that the thief is going to be converted into brick lover after seeing my photos of beautiful bricks.

I haven’t been totally transparent about my trip to France. It wasn’t just a regular brick hunt. I was gathering research material trying to tie up loose ends of a story passed in my family since 18th century.

As my research has been thwarted for now, I don’t feel safe keeping the story just to myself anymore. So let me share with you the biggest historical case of brick extremism with a legacy that spans more than 300 years.

Most of the bricklayers work for good of the society, but there are small groups of dark masons who might excel in the craft and on the surface deliver impeccable work but they have ulterior motives. In 17th century one of them put a devious plan in motion that robbed people of daylight and air.

It was 1696 and King William III of England was looking for a way how to cover lost revenue from people shaving silver coins. The story goes that one dark mason had King Billy’s ear and presented a very commonsense sounding idea. He recommended to get rid of a hated hearth tax law – a property tax where inspectors had to invade homes to count stoves – and instead base the new property tax on counting windows.

This suggestion was intricately devious as the dark mason knew that a tax like this will result in landlords bricking up the windows of their properties.

How did he know? The mason was somebody who had not only deep understanding of how buildings are constructed but also how the society is constructed and how laws can change the behaviour of people. What might have also helped is that as a result of the hearth tax some people destroyed their chimneys.

When the story was being told we always asked at this point why would anybody want for people to brick up their windows. We came up with a couple of scenarios. The most pragmatical motive would be that the mason wanted more work for his bricklaying company.

Other possibilities were much more twisted: to watch the world fall in disrepair, creating a divide, cutting people off from society and community, helping the spread of diseases that flourish in darkness, and reducing the world population.

Whatever were his motives the tax was a great success for this mischievous culprit. Windows on all different kinds of property have been the victim of bricking and blocking up. Houses, factories, fancy nonbrick buildings, and even some high castles had not been spared.

Imagine an unprivileged child of Georgian era, walking up the stairs at night to have a view on the city, trying to connect with the world despite everyday hardships and struggles, just to be left with a bitter feeling finding the window bricked up.

Imagine working men spending time in bricked up factories just to return home to see the health of their families deteriorate in unaired bleak rooms.

Imagine a house wall without windows. It is just a prison for both body and mind.

Some people went mad. “Are you bricking up my window? You might as well brick up the door. Don’t let anything in, don’t let anything out. Please block also the door for my donkey so he keeps me company.”

Some people tried to trick the system. To avoid the tax they have bricked up the door and pretended their house is not a house.

Because it’s not a house if it doesn’t have a door.

It also promoted deepening of the divide between poor and rich. To show off their wealth some people had unnecessary amount of windows installed on their dwellings where others were left just with one balcony.

The window tax had an undeniably excessive impact on society. Based on this tax in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776) Scottish economist Adam Smith coined the term “excess burden� to describe different kind of losses the society suffers as a result of taxation.

The law didn’t go unnoticed. Oh, there were fights between light and darkness. In 1784 there was a brick tax introduced that tried to make bricks more expensive.

One of the most crucial moments in this battle came with tripling of the window tax in 1797 by the prime minister William Pitt. Whole cities went dark overnight. What is also interesting to note is that it inspired France to replicate their own window tax next year - in 1798.

Speaking of other countries where property taxes have influenced the architecture a good example is The Netherlands — the houses in Amsterdam are thin and tall because the tax there had been based on width of their frontage. [This image is from South London.]

There was a growing opposition to the window tax from all corners of society. A satirical tract “A Sermon on the Window Tax� has been published that on the pretense of defending the existence of window tax went to uncover its nonsensical nature. I have picked four examples: [Source: Andrew E. Glantz - A Tax on Light and Air: Impact of the Window Duty on Tax Administration and Architecture, 1696-1851].

1. With the blocking up of windows Englishmen will achieve improved eyesight as they become used to the lack of light.

2. Tax should prohibit windows all together as half of the housebreaking crimes have been caused by windows and open air is also the more healthy.

3. We should be thankful for window tax as the darkness resulting from blocked up windows is nothing compared to the darkness that covered Egypt as ninth of the plagues.

4. The author went on to propose a superior tax - which would be duty on heads, tongues or even dogs. The rationale behind that being that it would be unlikely for people to go so far as to cut off their heads, tongues or kill their dogs to avoid the taxes.

Every pub and tavern with blocked up windows had become a host of discussions opposing window tax.

Drinking establishments with blocked up windows were losing part of their identity — is it even a proper pub anymore if you can’t throw your mate through the window?

Charles Dickens had been a regular visitor to public houses. His article “Health by act of parliament” from 1850 was a bold teardown of the negative impact of window tax. He wrote that neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the tax: “The adage ‘free as air’ has become obsolete by Act of Parliament.”

Later in the article he is to say something much more shocking: “As to death itself, it has been calculated that nearly ten thousand persons perish annually in London alone from diseases solely produced by an impeded circulation of air and admission of light.� Whoever was behind the adoption and upholding of window tax was also responsible for wasted health and deaths of tens of thousands of people every year.

After being in place for 155 years window tax was finally abolished in 1851, replaced by tax on inhabited houses, and plenty of people drank to that.

This unfortunately isn’t the end of the story. Even 170 years after the repeal of window tax you can still see blocked up windows. People didn’t unblock them for different reasons such as buildings being listed as of historic interest, buildings being altered in a way that renders the original window pointless, or just because of the cost.

It’s a vicious cycle because after some time the bricked up windows became normalised and their presence started influencing architectural visual language.

There are new buildings which emulate bricked up windows just as a stylistic element on their facades.

Somebody is keeping the fire burning under the legacy of blocked up windows through legislation, education, and other means.

It’s hard to understand what’s the purpose of this legacy, maybe it’s just to send a smug symbolical message hidden in plain sight.

The society has been blinded very many times in different ways and people often don’t realise somebody is making them live in the darkness.

Seeing the destructive force of window tax from 17th century one can only wonder what kind of intricate schemes are in place today to keep us blind and disconnected.

There is only one way forward — not accepting anything that bricks our view and harms our connection with the communities we are part of — open windows must prevail over the blind ones.

Epilogue. This is the end of the story but just the beginning of my investigation. I went to France to look for clues to the true identity of culprit or the organisation behind this conspiracy.

I don’t think a phenomenon that has been lasting for so long can be work of one person.

By studying patterns of brick work utilised in bricking up the windows in all the countries affected I hope to uncover the network that was behind this atrocity.

There is much more complex research to be undertaken to understand the role of window tax in context of The Glorious Revolution.

Window tax had been imposed during the reign of King William III which makes it indirectly connected to the religious conspiracy that “ensured the primacy of the Protestant faith in Britain,� by putting Prince of Orange on the throne of British realm.

Prince of Orange would never become King William III if he hadn’t been promised support by a group of English nobles known as the “Immortal Seven”. They wrote him a secret Letter of Invitation, telling him about dissatisfaction with “the present conduct of government in relation to their religion, liberties and properties (all which have been greatly invaded)” and informing him that if he went to land in England with an army the signatories and their allies would without question increase “that strength to a number double to the army here.”

The Glorious Revolution had been a success for the Immortal Seven and the new King had shown them his gratitude - they rose in ranks to Earls, Viscount, Admiral, and Bishop - and if window tax was in the interest of any of them or somebody connected to them, they definitely had the means to put the law in place.

We understand fragments of what had happened with the window tax but we can only guess how it was connected to the bigger picture.

You can help this investigation by posting #BrickedUp and #BlockedUp buildings.

Like breathing bricks

1 Dream Since childhood I had a recurring dream. In the dream I am walking in an endless brick tunnel.

The brick walls are watching me.

I stumble upon a door and I know that if I am to walk through the door I will become the craftiest mason. For years this was the moment where the dream stopped for me. I just didn’t have what it takes to go through the door — sometimes the door seemed to be just a drawing.

The door was too small to fit through and I would have to go through a lot of trash.

Or I just didn’t have the courage of Jennifer Aniston* to break through. * See A short story about Jennifer Aniston.

As I was growing up I had two passions - bricks and artificial intelligence. My first projects combining them were about creating the ideal facade.

I had to feed a simple learning network with history of architecture, project requirements, and site-specific data to make it output variant facade patterns.

The creation and spread of smart bricks is part of the standard history modules, but I thought what’s interesting to note is that it wasn’t easy and straightforward. After I got an idea of bricks that could observe their environment and understand patterns I pitched it to couple of companies as “solar powered deep learning neural network embedded in bricks” and I got mostly polite and sometimes confused rejections. Frustrated by this I have developed the project on my own and delivered the first pilot.

After the launch of smart bricks pilot my recurring dream has changed – when I came to the door I knew how to open it.

I walked through the portal into...

a landscape made out of bricks.

When I woke up I didn’t realise even the slightest how my invention could change the society in the long run. I was unable to see the big picture because I was too focused on details – optimising algorithm that processed constant stream of observational data, or

trying to perfect a very banal function.

2 Body language Only when the bricks started developing their own body language I first got a glimpse of what the future might behold.

It wasn’t one uniform language – the brick networks were autonomous, decentralised, and based in different settings – so they have developed a variety of languages. Pictorial,

territorial markings,

having a dialogue,

parallel streams of consciousness,

flowing patterns,

patterns adapting to the environment,

using shades of bricks to communicate,

compressing insights,

learning how to forget,

overwriting the old with new,

creating connections where there haven’t been any before,

filling in the blanks,

creating mythologies,

territorial markings.

Having a lot to say about highs, and even more to say about lows.

It was at this time when bricks have started communicating with plants,

looking for a shared language,

finding a common ground,

coming closer to each other and merging in subtle ways.

Amazing and unpredictable things happened later in the history of smart bricks, but I will always have a soft spot for this era of newly created languages.

Observing the sheer richness of expressions.

And then the bricks started developing faces.

3 Walls talking Faces were there to express recognition and understanding of emotions, show empathy, and indicate potential bias.

Joy,

surprise,

anger,

brick faces were carrying complex emotional vectors reflecting their learnings,

recognizing injustice,

promoting compassion.

Bricks have also used the facades to indicate their own potential bias - as various types of bias are inevitable in the process of learning.

If the example set is skewed to black and white instances, the learning is going to be skewed too.

If you are learning from somebody who is biased, you are in danger of inheriting their biases.

If you are looking just for patterns that confirm your assumptions, you’ll exclude stories that don’t corroborate them.

Recognizing bias is the first step in overcoming it.

To sum it up, as the humanity was going about it’s daily business at steady pace,

the smart bricks started creating their own languages.

By showing us their learnings on behavioural patterns and empathy they have opened doors we haven’t even thought possible.

As a result accelerating and transforming the development of various aspects of human culture.

They have also made some internal jokes the best cryptologists are still trying to decipher.

3.1 Landscape changes Rewrite yourself in a way you need to be. It sounds like a cliche from a self-help book, but smart bricks have developed the ability to change themselves.

Adding new layers,

repairing broken bits,

rejuvenating,

extending,

connecting,

replicating,

rearranging the building blocks,

merging disjointed geometries

changing the landscape.

With these newly developed skills smart bricks have started repairing elements of society. Funny enough one of the first autonomous tasks had been identifying and unblocking of wrongfully blocked windows and doors.

3.2 Window tax repeal It’s funny because in the early 21st century a distant relative of mine wrote an essay on blocked up windows and then went missing in the process of gathering materials that would reveal a conspiracy behind window tax – and here you have smart bricks suddenly fixing what he has written about and what has been left wrong for a really long time.

The changes were for the good of society, but surprisingly there was a strong push against artificial intelligence doing any autonomous activities on this scale. Some forces at play were against the changes that were out of their control.

While smart bricks were marking windows for unblocking a layered campaign to limit them was going on.

Political, trying to put in place regulations that would work as barriers, slowing down the developments.

Media, spreading fear and uncertainty.

uncertainty.

Grassroots, algorithmic sabotages and deployment of dark AI.

Intellectual property, using patents as a barrier to stifle innovation.

Before this happened I considered the essay just as an slightly eccentric research project, but after experiencing the push back, the window tax conspiracy started to feel much more real. There were forces at play that tried their best to keep some windows blocked up for as long as possible.

In some places you can still see the scars from this battle (as they have been preserved).

It took some time but they have slowly built up trust.

You don’t get to 944,432,211 smart bricks in operation without making a few friends.

When you can’t see that you have a problem, you can go on living your whole life in bad conditions – used to them or helpless, just with an uncertain feeling that something is wrong.

But if something or someone helps you realize what is wrong and you manage to unblock it, you...

open up your potential to flourish.

Some changes were easy – one brick marking the door to be unbricked

wall showing where there is a need for door.

Some changes were hard.

In a place that was previously made inaccessible,

a path has emerged.

Changes have been creeping in

and even one unbricked window made them into outspoken defendants of smart bricks,

ready to symbolically declare loyalty on the facades.

But I don’t want to give the wrong impression that smart bricks were working in unison focused on a single goal of positive societal transformation.

Some facades just wanted to have fun... and impressive hairstyles.

4 Tribes There were many tribes of smart bricks.

These tribes have developed based on the differences in setting where the bricks were deployed, learning methods used, and objectives pursued.

It was a field of constant tribal competition in efficiency and accuracy, especially when it came to overlapping objectives.

4.1 Tribes - Observing settings Setting shapes the perception of reality by being the strongest source of observational data.

Imagine observing the world by being embedded between a church and a playground. It would shape in a very particular way your knowledge about the games people play.

What is mundane,

breaking the rules,

mess,

disrepair

obsolescence,

re-purposing,

tradition / addiction?

The difference between helplessness,

hopelessness,

and powerlessness.

Multivariate testing of a family house.

Studying different aspects of society in a variety of settings has proven that one change in input can have a massive impact.

Some smart bricks preferred to stay almost invisible,

hiding under the surface.

Some were living on the borders, connecting with atmosphere,

merging into forest,

submerging in water,

creating symbiotic forms with plants.

4.2 Tribes - Methods and objectives What really created tribes wasn’t the setting but various learning methods and objectives. These were the main tribes:

Symbolists,

using logic, rules, and inverse deduction,

to fill in gaps in the existing knowledge.

Connectionists,

using connections to calculate the gradient and backpropagation of errors,

emulating the brain.

Evolutionaries,

using genetics and self-organizing models

to s(t)imulate evolution.

Bayesians,

using statistical probability

to systematically reduce uncertainty.

Analogizers,

using pattern recognition

to notice similarities between old and new.

There were also approaches and facets of identity shared across different tribes: Engineers/

Speed freaks

visibly upgrading themselves,

adding external supportive structures,

creating data pipeline jungle.

Compressionists,

approximating matrix factorization,

compression as cognition/

/consciousness.

Combiners,

mixing different approaches.

Tree Huggers,

using mostly tree-based models

like Random Forests.

and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees,

finding a path through the decision forest.

5 End There were plenty of discussions about how smart bricks are going to affect humankind, artificial intelligence has been presented as “our final invention” – a threat looming over society.

Some of the fears were grounded in reality.

There were individuals and groups who have tried to misuse the new found understandings of how society works to exploit it for their own interest.

The black box problem was tied to systems which had responsibility to make decisions but there was an uncertainty about how they reached them.

Fears and trust issues merged into nightmare scenarios in which humanity would be reduced to dust;

AI conglomerate going rogue and deciding that it doesn’t want to keep humans as pets anymore.

But as people were discussing which path to take.

– some options being quite extreme –

harsh regulations

slowing down the tempo –

the smart bricks were becoming unstoppable force of positive change more and more intertwined with the society.

From my perspective two things were crucial. First one was that smart bricks had more capacity for empathy than humankind

and they taught as how to be more empathetic.

Changing our path

opening up different frames of reference.

Second one has been that through their own invention of smart brick dust they have enabled people to connect and be a part of global consciousness.

In the end I realise that my dream of being craftiest mason wasn’t about shaping the buildings,

it was about enabling the uncovering of hidden patterns that shape the society itself.

Luckily the autonomous bricks knew better.

Berlin brick buildingsroman I

Prologue My taste for intricate patterns didn’t come from my father, who indulged in simple jokes.

But from my mother, who was a weaver of complex allegories. My favourite story of hers is about owls hiding daylight under their wings.

I wondered how, being so different, they could have formed a union. But I noted that in me there was a mixture of the naivety of the one and the complexity of the other.

I have always suspected I’ve been adopted. I didn’t have my parents eyes, mine were too far apart. My mouth always frozen in surprise. My thinking all blocked up. Pipe full of repulsive liquid running around my body.

There were just too many differences. And then there were branches, following me everywhere, like a gloom of impossibility.

Character I was naive and closed up.

Not letting anybody in.

Once somebody had found a hole in my defenses.

I made sure, in highly recognizable way, that nobody is going to try to reach out through that hole again.

The only way in would be to break-in by force, but my desolate facade repulsed everybody from trying to explore my interior.

The only thing I liked were pipes.

I have opened up my bricked up windows a bit just on the off chance somebody comes up to discuss pipes.

But even after I found a way how to make the pipe longer, nobody came knocking on my door.

I was living in a wall, comfy and cosy!

Seven deadly sins had no chance to corrupt me.

One day I have stumbled upon the cutest door ever, but nobody responded when I knocked on it and when I tried looking through the window only thing I saw were bricks from a close-up.

I didn’t even know how to open myself. How could I open somebody else?

“You need to practice, dumbass.” “See those black doors down there? If you try running at them full speed they will for sure open up.” I turned around to see two big-mouthed three-eyed frogs who must have overheard me speaking to myself.

I crashed full power into the middle door. Did it open? No, frogs were just having a laugh. I felt rejected and hurt.

This vulnerable action enabled me to see my blocked-up self from outside.

Blocked-up and restrained!

Lifting my heavy eyelids.

Recognizing the known unknowns about myself.

Sensing the presence of unknown unknowns, aspects that have been hidden for so long they have vanished.

Starry-eyed and ready to open up.

I met Pavel, he had an irresistible smile and I ignored all the warning signs.

I have planted all my hopes in these two flower pots. That was a year ago. Maybe they just need a bit more time to grow.

“Walk through the gate 22A, the bricks crawling all around will make it seem like it is vibrating.�

I had accidentally joined a cult.

Keep looking in the circle and all truth is going to be revealed.

Focus on the tilted square and the structure hidden behind visible world is going to appear to you.

A sacred shrine that heard all my secret wishes.

The seven portals to infinity. Live by The Order and the gray infinity will take you in.

Branches of doubt slowly started creeping in on me.

I have started noticing a layer of corruption pertaining to the Order.

Obscuring my vision.

Touching the highest of places.

Waves of suspicion.

Distrust in hierarchy.

Facing an invisible wall.

Hiding behind a web of lies.

“You are looking at it the wrong way!” Another three eyed frog, this time upside down, trying to share it’s wisdom with me.

Reflect on the situation and make a plan.

Exit through the back door.

Find an untainted higher ground.

Take a leap of faith.

Looking at myselves.

Journey through the valley of bricks.

Amphitheater.

I have fully opened up.

I have built my first wall!

Trying to connect.

Couldn’t find anybody who would let me in.

Desperately seeking symmetry.

Messed-up weirdo.

Birthmark.

I thought I have made a friend, but one day he disappeared without an explanation.

Chillin’ outside with my trashy mates.

“Find some real friends! You are just distracting yourself from the boredom of your empty life! Bring us carrots!� I turned around to see the advice is coming from three rabbits.

Constantly anxious and almost never open.

I said hi to this blue music dog and he introduced me to his human.

I have made a friend.

The End

Thank you for reading this draft version, I would love to hear your feedback at andrej.chudy@gmail.com You can read my current story at https://www.instagram.com/andrejchudy/