On Nov 15, 8:57 pm, " wrote:
On Nov 15, 5:28 pm, DerbyDad03 wrote:





The other day I was parked outside a local Recreation Center that was
built no more than 10 years ago. The 2 story building was either brick
or brick faced. I noticed something I don't recall ever seeing on a
brick building before.

The wall I was looking at had 2 banks of large windows on the first
floor and a double-door entry way in the middle. Picture 2 conference
rooms on either side of the entryway, with almost wall to wall, almost
floor to ceiling windows. There were no windows or openings on the
second floor.

Along the left edge of the entry way and each bank of windows, there
appeared to be an expansion joint, filled with an off-white material,
running from the top left corner of the opening straight up to the
roof line.

I'll tell ya, it didn't look very nice. If you can picture where these
joints were (along the left edge of each opening) you can see that
they were not evenly spaced along the building, so they looked very
out of place. They broke the second story brick wall up into 3 uneven
sections.

My grandfather was a mason who built some the massive brick paper
factories in Massachusetts as well as a number of brick houses. As far
as I recall, none of these buildings had expansion joints like the
one's on this rec building.

Anybody have an idea of why this was done?

Look at the BIA (Brick Industry Association) web site Tech Notes.
I have seen recent (1960 or 70 ) buildings that have suffered from
expansion.
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The joints look very much like Figure 6 of Section 18A. It's a shame
that they have to break up the beautiful flow of a brick wall by
placing the expansion joints unevenly across the face. It would
almost seem worth the expense to add more, perhaps on both sides of
all openings, if only for the asthetics. Of course, this might create
a whole different set of structural issues that would have to dealt
with.

Thanks for pointing me to that site. I wish Grandpa was still around
so I could talk to him about it. I miss him.