Brixel Bricks
Ketley Brick Co
Ketley’s ‘Brixel bricks’ are an innovative solution for creating intricate custom patterns, designs, images, or logos in brickwork relief without the need for expensive customized bricks.
They are essentially a set of 5 unique pyramidal shaped clay bricks, which can be volume machine-extruded and arranged to form textured projecting façade designs and images. Each brick shape has either one, two or three pyramidal protrusions in combination with two, one or no flat sections.
Using a pioneering Brixel digital tool, any binary, two-tone image or photo can be converted into brick relief. The tool first pixelates the image, rendering it into “Brixels” consisting of three 65mm pixels. Each pixel is either a light or dark unit and is represented within the design by either a protruding pyramidal brick element or a flat brick element.
The digital tool produces a complete 3D representation of the brick image, determining the placement of each Brixel type and calculating how many of each is required. It also shows how the design will look with sunlight from different directions. Virtually any design can be converted into a two tone, binary design – the larger the façade, the more detail can be introduced.
Ketley’s Brixel Bricks are exceptionally durable with F2 frost resistance rating, suitable for tall, exposed facades in harsh weather conditions and are available in natural Staffordshire clay colours. They can be extruded as full bricks or brick slips for both traditional and modern construction methods.
To demonstrate the potential of ‘Brixel’ technology, Ketley designed and constructed a commemorative 3.5 x 3.5 metre silhouette of HM Queen Elizabeth II in brick relief. The company is making a £350,000 investment to support the production of ‘Brixel bricks, confident that it will be an industry game changer enabling more creative and ambitious textured and architectural brickwork.