Darted bricks on Easton Street

[Lou]

The Easton Square Apartments on 7901 Easton Street had darted bricks in the hallway.  I saw them in 1979 and I thought that it was an interesting design.

I have not seen darted bricks anywhere since.  In 2015 I went there to take a picture of them.  So that I could show people what I was talking about if the subject came up.

To my dismay, all of the bricks had been torn down and replaced with inferior quality bricks.  The new bricks are so soft that people are carving their names into them.   The swimming pool is filled with broken bricks.  I guess my opportunity for a photo shoot is in the bottom of that pile.

Would anyone just happen to have a picture of the darted bricks at Easton Square?  Or examples of darted bricks elsewhere?
 

[Ricardo]

Apparently darted bricks are hard to come by. I Googled it and this is the best I got:  http://www.i29brick.com/Brick_Examples.php

 

If there are darted bricks in any of those pictures, you need to already know what they look like as there are no product descriptions.

[gnu]

Wondering if the OP meant Dart-Tex or dart textured bricks...

 

http://www.btsbm.com/pages/textures/face_brick_nnj_dart1.html

[Cookiie]

I am quite familiar with a lot of terms when it comes to building and renovating, but I have never heard of darted bricks. I guess it's off to Google to educate myself first. 

[Lara]

My guess would be that the new bricks used are of the soft mud variety, with the 20% water content, that had not been burned/dried properly, hence their poor quality. This brick type can be the most durable, though, with the right manufacturing conditions. 

 

On the subject of the original bricks, I'd never heard of darted bricks, either; a question, though - how long have Dart-Tex bricks been around for? I tried looking this up but could not find the related info. The reason I'm asking is, one, out of curiosity and, two, to see if it fits with the timeline of when the building went up.

[Dustin]

Dart-tex sounds like darted bricks wirh a more marketable moniker.

 

From what I can tell, they are used more for asthetic purposes than anything else.

[SyuzVR]

Thank you guys for your informative posts. I liked the pics dear gnu 

[Lou]

I was not aware that darted bricks were so unknown.  I should have given more of an explanation. 

 

I got the term 'darted bricks' from a man that was living in the apartments at the time.  He is the one that pointed them out and piqued my interest in them.  I can't remember his name.  The way he talked I thought the term was common.

 

Most bricks are laid straight, so that the face is smooth.  Some bricks are laid with a row or two sticking out maybe a quarter inch or so.  For example, in art deco.  These techniques probably have names, but I don't know them.  I'm not a brick layer.

 

I just looked up in wikipedia about brickwork.  Now I know some terms.

 

The bricks on Easton Street were all laid stretcher, with the face smooth.  Except that random bricks were darted.  If I remember correctly, only about one in fifty had the dart.  On one side of the hall, I'd say about 15 or 20 were darted.  Maybe more.

 

What I mean by darted is that after the brick is laid so that it has a smooth face, one edge on either perpend side is tapped so that the brick is slightly diagonal to the face of the wall.  It was tapped in about a quarter inch.

 

It makes a notch.  Similar to the notch on the bottoms of glass jars that machines use to bump them out of the molds.

 

The effect makes an interesting pattern.  I'm surprised that it is so rare.  Could that building be the only one in Houston?  I haven't seen it in any other city either.