BRICKS

Ed Giardina

Art

Ed Giardina collects bricks. With only seven items this unusual collection is not extensive, but it is select, for these bricks have history. “I have a brick from the Packard Factory in Detroit, Michigan,” Ed explains, “and a brick from the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.” What makes them significant? “They are both from failed sites that produced elements for a failed system.”

And herein lies the fascination, for these modest units of hardened clay, which humans have used for over 9000-years to build physical infrastructure, also speak to superstructure: the ideologies and imaginings that dominate a particular time and place. As Giardina explains: “Bricks are simple forms but [they] represent so many complex ideas. Class, labor, economics, political theory, propaganda, production, geology, architecture, struggle and rebellion, and so on.” 

Take the Packard Plant brick, part of the stuff of Motor City, it bore silent witness to the boom and bust of US industry. Once the world’s most modern car factory, the Packard Plant was producing 300,000 automobiles annually in the mid-twentieth century. Yet in 1958, at the peak of the post-World War Two consumer boom, the Packard Corporation failed.

Although parts of the factory complex were rented out, the site declined in tandem with the surrounding city. By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, the derelict Plant was already an icon of industrial, economic, social, and civic failure. Sold to a developer for pennies on the dollar, the 40-acre site is now a popular movie-stand-in for a post-trauma landscape.

Prof. Giardina loves a quote from Gilles Deleuze: "A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window."[1] For Deleuze, concepts were tools of analysis, likewise for Ed, who “did not set out to collect bricks per se,” the bricks are “evidence to help me understand a system.”

With bricks from empires ancient and industrial, Ed’s collection speaks to toppled structures, a system in decline, and evaporated dreams. But a brick is also “a building block on the most human scale,” and so Ed’s modest collection also points out the potential for building, and perhaps for unbuilding, a better future.[2]

Notes

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1987

[2] Jonathan Glancey, “Kiln Time,” The Guardian, 11.15.2003: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/15/highereducation.history