Shitting bricks

‘Shitting bricks’ stands both for the fear of the blank page, creative blockades and lack of ideas as well as for the loose throwing down of blocks – in this context inspired by the forms of brutalist buildings.

The aim is to derive the most important forms and structures by looking at brutalist buildings and then experimenting with these in the form of different layouts or design concepts. This is intended to show readers how much designers, for example, can take from their environment and inspire them to go through everyday life attentively and break out of their ‘everyday routine’ and typical guidelines by looking at things from unusual angles.


Ideas and inspiration

By linking architecture and design, ‘Shitting bricks’ invites readers to push creative boundaries and find innovative solutions. Readers are encouraged to look at their surroundings more consciously and see the world around them as a constant source of inspiration – just like I did when I was looking for a topic for my bachelor’s thesis. Right at the front of the race were the overarching themes of nature and architecture, basically most of the world around me. After some deliberation, initial developments and various tests, I finally decided in favour of, well, this. My concept is based on the well-known ‘Tetris’, the moving and fitting of shapes. The cover, my poster, the stand-up display and the page display in my presentation are also inspired by this. For the rest of the design, I was inspired in particular by the features of brutalist buildings as well as by some existing works on the subject. So I decided in favour of the square format and thicker paper. Chunky, hard, angular. This is also reflected in the book slipcase. I also roughly adapted the layout to the shapes of the respective buildings in order to maintain the common thread of ‘shape theft’ throughout the book. Speaking of the common thread – I opted for the open thread binding to convey the ‘raw, unfinished impression’ that is also associated with the ‘as found’ philosophy of Brutalism. In this way, I hope I’ve succeeded in packaging my theme and my ideas in a visually appealing, coherent overall package.

My approach

‘Shitting bricks’ consists of two parts, the theoretical and the creative part. The theoretical part is this one. Here I explain my motivation, give insights into the development of my concept and provide the reader with basic knowledge about Brutalism in the architectural sense. In the design section, I deal with the experiments of taking forms from buildings and using them to build something new. In this way, architecture and design are combined and something new is created. To do this, I picked out various brutalist buildings around the world and ‘stole’ their shapes. I then show them once again on the building so that readers can easily understand where I got them from. On the following pages, I play Tetris with these shapes and happily push them around. To show what can be built from them, I show two possible layouts at the end of each row.

The ‘brutal Tetris’ approach

As I mentioned earlier, part of both my design and my concept is based on the game ‘Tetris’, because it’s basically moving and fitting shapes – which is exactly what I’ll be doing in my experiments. First I ‘steal’ the shapes from the building, then I transfer them into a series of possible layout variations by rotating, enlarging or reducing the shapes and rearranging them completely. Finally, I choose two variants at random and use them as templates for my sample layouts to see what I can do with them. But why these buildings of all things? In view of the mass of brutalist buildings, I decided on the most interesting and different shapes around the world. This will hopefully allow me to use a wide range of shapes and dimensions in my layouts to show the diversity of Brutalism in a different way. With the help of small paper cut-outs, black pens and red highlighters, viewers can immediately join in and sketch their own layouts – even from what they can discover directly on site. Additional plaster blocks could also be used to make this Tetris experience even more tactile and create a way to approach it in an even more playful way. Either way, readers are encouraged to go beyond traditional design concepts and explore new, unconventional approaches. They can apply the derived forms and structures directly in their own experiments and also join in with all the other forms. Using the example, in this case looking at brutalist architecture, readers can recognise how creative inspiration can be drawn from seemingly boring sources, encouraging them to be more aware of their surroundings and discover potential inspiration in their daily lives.