Surface Design Awards – Complete

• EXTERIOR SURFACE OF THE YEAR - NEW
  This is a new category that recognises wall and surface design products including decorative, creative and inventive surfaces for the exterior of building including both commercial and residential properties.

• TEMPORARY STRUCTURE
  A Temporary Structure that is not intended to remain where it is erected for more than a short period of time. This award focuses on the increase of temporary and pop-up structures being more sophisticated and aesthetical in their design.

Brixel Bricks
Ketley’s clay ‘Brixel bricks’ provide a completely new way of creating bespoke complex patterns, designs, images or logos in brickwork relief without the need for costly bespoke bricks. They are a set of five unique machine-extruded pyramidal shaped bricks which can be arranged to form textured projecting façade designs and images.

How it works
Using a pioneering Brixel digital tool, any binary, two-tone image, or photo can be converted into brick relief. The tool pixelates the image and renders it into “Brixels” with each “brixel” made up of three 65mm pixels and each pixel separated by an equivalent 10mm mortar joint. Each pixel is either a light or dark unit within the design and is represented accordingly by either a protruding pyramidal brick element or a flat brick element.

There are 5 different types of Brixel bricks each with either one, two or three pyramidal protrusions in combination with two, one or no flat sections. The 3D brixel visualisation tool produces a 3D representation of the brick image with the bricks laid in 3rd bond and determines where each type of the five brixel types needs to be placed and how many of each type are required.

It shows how the design will look at the chosen resolution and how it plays with light from different directions. Integral to the projecting brick facade is the play of light and dark and the way the bricks cast shadows as the light shifts, which really brings the representation alive. Lighting tools are used to show how the pattern works with the movement of the sun during the day.

‘Brixel’Brick performance
As ‘Brixel Bricks’ are made to durable Class A engineering brick standards and are F2 rated for frost resistance, they can be used for tall, exposed facades in severe weather locations without risk of degrading. Their modern sharp-edged aesthetic is ideally suited to precise and detailed brickwork, and they are available in natural Staffordshire clay colours, fired without the use of artificial surface pigments or stains. ‘Brixel bricks’ can be extruded as either full bricks for a traditional construction or as brick slips for modern methods of construction.

The first ‘Brixel’ brick façade

The first structure to be made to demonstrate the capability and potential of the innovative ‘Brixel’ brick technology for architectural surface design is a textured façade of HM Queen Elizabeth II designed and constructed for the Platinum Jubilee in June 2022 at a cost of only £1280.

This commemorative 3.5 x 3.5 metre silhouette of HM Queen Elizabeth II in brick relief is currently on display in a temporary installation at The Brickworks Museum in Southampton.

In order to create the structure, a binary image of Queen Elizabeth was selected and rendered into “brixels” using the Brixel tool. Once the level of detail and the final 3D image was approved, the required number of each “brixel” type was calculated, and a template for the position of each brick unit was produced to ensure minimal waste.

676 Ketley Staffordshire red brick slips, made up of the five different ‘Brixel’ brick slips, together with regular plain-faced brick slips, were used in the construction of this intricate façade of subtly changing light and shadows.

The textured silhouette of HM Queen Elizabeth II demonstrates the level of detailing and precision that could only have been achieved through this pioneering ‘Brixel’ technology.

Impact on the industry
‘Brixel bricks’ have the potential to be a game changer for the design and construction of architectural brickwork, opening up new design opportunities for architects, whilst greatly enhancing the capabilities of brick manufacturing. The creation of textured silhouette of HM Queen Elizabeth II using ’Brixel bricks’ has already attracted significant interest.

Keith Aldis, chief executive of the Brick Development Association, commented: -

“There’s no doubt that Ketley Brick’s brand-new ‘Brixel bricks’ have tremendous potential to create intricate brick relief facades… Brick is such a wonderfully versatile building material, which is graphically underlined by Ketley’s ground-breaking and imaginative initiative.”

Impact on Ketley
Ketley Brick is currently making a £350,000 investment to expand its capabilities in the production of special shaped bricks and bricks incorporating bespoke designs. The company is installing a new extruder, which will also enable the manufacture of oversized special bricks, perforated bricks and open up the manufacturing process to new brick designs. Alongside this Ketley are also installing a new special brick dryer based on a new, reduced oxygen, drying technology which will enable larger units to be dried effectively and significantly faster.

Ketley’s clay ‘Brixel bricks’, (a set of five practical machine-extruded pyramidal shaped bricks which can be arranged to form textured projecting façade designs) and its associated Brixel digital technology opens up significant potential for creating ambitious and innovative designs in brickwork, thereby allowing architects to create complex brick relief patterns in a commercial and cost-effective way.

Virtually any suitable image can be converted through the Brixel technology into a two tone, binary design, and incorporated into a wider façade – the larger the façade, the greater the detail that can be incorporated (as increasing the number of Brixels enables a higher resolution to be achieved)

Benefits include: -

• Scope of design – opens up the potential for architects to create ever more complex brickwork designs.
• Construction flexibility - can be extruded as full bricks for a traditional construction or as brick slips for modern methods of construction.
• Cost-effective – Brixel bricks are machine extruded, which is more economically viable than ‘pressed’, handmade or bespoke options.
• Class A and F2 standard – industry leading durability, longevity, and frost resistance means that they can be used in high, exposed facades or in severe weather locations without risk of degrading.
• Sharp-edged aesthetic - their sharp-edged aesthetic is ideally suited to precise and detailed brickwork.
• Natural tones – available in kiln fired Staffordshire clay colours, which are manufactured the traditional way without artificial stains or pigments.
• Confidence of outcome – gives complete confidence that a design is achievable right from the start ensuring minimal errors, waste or snagging.

Total embodied carbon of A tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

• Total embodied carbon
Total embodied carbon for this Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II, which measures 11.25m2 and is made using 676 extruded brick slips, is: 7.4kg CO2/m2. (The total embodied carbon for clay brick generally is 26kg CO2/m2)

• Durability
As Brixel Bricks are made to Class A engineering brick standards, they are exceptionally durable, low maintenance, with extremely low water absorption and high compressive strength, which gives them even longer service life expectancy, further reducing their environmental impact.

• Local production
The Brixel bricks for this installation were made at Ketley’s brickworks in Dudley, West Midlands, using native Etruria Marl clay dug from the company’s own quarry nearby.

• Sustainable manufacturing
Ketley Brick have been awarded an SME Decarbonisation Award by the British Ceramics Federation. This award recognises the breadth of decarbonisation projects and activities that are being undertaken. Ketley have already cut their carbon emissions by around 30% since 2005 and they are involved in a variety of projects to help achieve net zero targets.
Ketley are part of Phase 2 of “Hydrogen for the ceramics sector” project looking at hydrogen as an alternative fuel for the ceramics industry.
They are also working on a heat recovery project to re-use as much of waste heat as possible to supply their brick and tile dryers in order to further reduce their gas consumption.
They have been part of a research and innovation pilot project with Cambridge Carbon Capture looking at converting the CO2 emissions into a solid mineral by-product.

• Lifecycle
As the service life of clay bricks is estimated at a minimum of 150 years, the expectation is that over this lifecycle, overall carbon emissions of Brixel Bricks will be extremely low per year of service life.

• Naturally sourced
As clay is a natural organically occurring material, Brixel bricks do not contain toxins or volatile organic compounds.

• Minimal wastage
The precision of the Brixel system in terms of the quantity or Brixel bricks required and the efficiency of the extrusion process means that there is minimal waste.
• Reuse and recycling
Clay brick is the only building product that is 100% recyclable and so Brixel Bricks have the potential to be salvaged and re-used in other applications.

• Fire resistance
Clay Brixel Bricks are non-combustible with an A1 rating and are resistant to the spread of fire providing a safe sustainable building material.

• High thermal mass.
Clay bricks have the ability to absorb, store and release heat energy which helps to moderate temperature changes within a brick building, reducing the risk of overheating during the day and slowing the fall in temperature at nighttime.

Brick sustainability credentials

The sustainability of clay brick as a building material is well documented: -
• An EPD commissioned (Environmental Product Declaration) by The Brick Development Association in respect of the “generic brick” states that the service life of the BDA average UK brick is given as a minimum of 150 years for a half brick thick cavity wall and a minimum of 600 years for a full brick construction. https://www.brick.org.uk/uploads/downloads/breg-en-epd-000002-v4.pdf

• Brick structures have an A+ rating awarded by the building research establishments (BRE) Green Guide, https://tools.bregroup.com/greenguide/ggelement.jsp?buildingType=Retail&category=1005&parent=6&elementType=10117

The main challenge in developing Brixel Bricks was ensuring that the actual physical bricks had a profile that could be extruded by machine and handled through the drying and firing process efficiently, thereby making them commercially viable.

During the development process, various ideas were explored including dividing each digital brick into 12 rather than 3 pixels. However, this resulted in a profile that could not be extruded.

To create an accurate representation of the image, the pixels needed to be square, and it became clear that the best profile that could be extruded as a brick by machine would be the 3-pixel design.

This had up to three triangular protrusions per brick, allowing each brick to have up to 3 elements of relief, where each pixel is 65x65mm and each brick included space for the equivalent of 2 10mm mortar joints to maintain the 1/3 bond over the facade.

The final ‘Brixel brick’ design with its 3-pixel units struck the right balance between achieving a level of detail that would provide a good representation of an image, and the requirements to produce them in a commercially viable way.

Another challenge was to find a way to extrude the different shapes without the cost of making different dies. By working closely with the inhouse engineers in the Ketley factory, the development team was able to work with different plates made from laser cut steel which were bolted onto the existing brick die to create the 5 different brick profiles.

Shortlisted for Innovation 2023 Brick Awards
Shortlisted for Innovation 2023 Façade Awards