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Rotated brick

A low wall of ordinary red brick where the colour only arrives at an angle.

Parked home 24" retaining wall Iranian rotated brick glaze on the header ends
What it is

Ordinary red brick, turned, with the colour kept on the ends.

A low decorative retaining wall — 24 inches — for the front of the house, built with the Iranian rotated-brick technique: normal red brick, glaze or accent on each header end only.

The header is the short end of a brick, the face an ordinary wall swallows into the bond. Turn each brick off the wall plane and those ends come out with it, angled along the run. Glaze only those, and the wall carries a colour its face never shows.

So the wall has two readings. Square to it, red brick. Walk past it and the rotation swings the glazed ends toward you, one after another, and the colour arrives.

It is being drawn rather than sketched. The pattern lives in a 3D brick visualizer, which is the honest tool for it: the whole effect is what the wall does at an angle, and an elevation drawn flat is exactly the one view in which the trick does not exist.

Backburner, and still a pattern rather than a plan.

How it works

Three decisions, and only one of them costs anything.

The body is normal brick

Standard red brick does the work of being a wall. Nothing exotic in the mass of it.

The glaze is on the header end

Glaze or accent on the short end of each brick, and nowhere else — the face that a normal wall buries.

The rotation is what shows it

Turned off the wall plane, those ends angle out along the run. The colour is there the whole time; the angle is what hands it over.

A retaining wall, 24 inches, in front of the house.
Where it stands

Design iterating in the visualizer.

That is the whole of it. The pattern is being turned over in 3D, and nothing about it is fixed yet.

Lineage — the Iranian rotated-brick technique · related: front entry.