Faux Painted Masonry Techniques
This past week, we took a look at gunnite as a type of soil stabilization, which is really similar to a retaining wall, in some ways, just much larger and built in a different type of shape and form. We mentioned that retaining walls are often damaged, through exposure to the elements, to the point of failure, by skipping important periods of restoration such as repointing and or tuck pointing.
Today, we’re switching gears and looking at a very different type of topic, yet the issue of pointing or repointing comes up here as well because this particular building has not been fully repointed, yet the painting was done, oddly, just to accentuate the brickwork or distinguish it from the adjacent, interspersed mortar joints.
The picture above and the picture below are both moderately wide angle pictures that show the majority of a building facade. It’s hard to see the mortar joints closely in these pictures, but we show those mortar joints more closely in the subsequent following pictures below. Here though, in the wide angle picture, you can get a sense that it looks like the mortar joints have a different color than the brickwork.
That would be a common type of condition, in most cases, if a painted building is repointed. After repointing a historic brick building, it’s not necessary to paint on top of the new mortar joints, even in cases where the remainder of the building, the brick faces, have been painted, in most scenarios.
At a glance, the conditions described above appear to apply to this building as well, it looks like a painted building that was repointed after the paint had been applied. That’s not exactly the case though. Here, something different has actually happened. It’s very interesting because it requires an exponentially higher amount of tedious labor.
The title of this article sounds strange because it’s saying masonry painted on top of masonry and it sounds like it’s an error, but it’s not an error, here, they literally painted the shape of the bricks on top of the actual bricks. But they didn’t just paint the facade wholesale or even paint the main field areas of the brick wall wholesale.
Instead, they went through an incredibly high amount of tedious work to paint the face of each individual brick in a rectilinear brick shape type pattern. They didn’t use a massive stencil or even really any tools to help guide them or make their painting work easier. Instead, they did it in the most difficult way possible which was to paint the edge of each brick by hand, individually.
Looking closely at this wall, we found it a bit of difficult to explain how or why somebody did this. We can think of handful of reasons, but point or take away here is that sometimes people go through great lengths to paint masonry just to look like masonry. We’ve seen the same thing at several other buildings and in the next few weeks, we’re going to show other really interesting examples.
As you get close to the building, you start to see that the paint follows the form of the brickwork very closely, but it’s not perfect. The slight deviations or differences show that the bricks were actually painted blue after the white paint was applied below.
In the even closer view of the photo below, you can start to pick up some of those visually apparent differences. In some cases the blue paint goes on to the mortar joints, in some cases the blue paint doesn’t cover the brickwork completely.
The next picture shows it so clearly that there’s no mistaking what actually was done here. The blue paint was applied to the face of the bricks, but in some cases, as you can see here, the blue paint went over the edge of the brick and onto the mortar joint just slightly but enough to see the difference.
We can Help
Our company focuses on historic restoration more than modern building upkeep, maintenance, and construction, but our company understands both types of construction very well and a full picture well-rounded approach is needed in any niche in the construction industry. Although we focus on historic restoration, repointing, tuckpointing and historic brick repair, our company also has technical knowledge and competencies in the areas of modern and contemporary construction as well as we become one of the leaders in that area of the market today. Understanding both historic and modern or contemporary construction is useful because both aspects help understand the challenges and potential solutions for challenges in building science and construction.
We can help with a variety of historic masonry restoration needs and upkeep, from modest tuckpointing and or repointing to complicated and extensive historic masonry restoration. Infinity Design Solutions is a historic restoration specialist contractor specializing in both historic masonry restoration such as tuckpointing our repointing, and brick repair. If you have questions about the architectural details or facade of your historic building in Washington DC, reach out and say hello and if we can help we’ll be glad to assist you. You can email us or call us on the telephone at the following link: contact us here.
