Building with Glen Gery Glazed Brick

While most of the common details of masonry construction apply to construction with glazed brick, some changes must be made to these details to allow building a trouble-free glazed brick veneer. These changes are necessary because, unlike other brick, the glaze on the brick is impervious: neither water nor water vapor pass through the glazed surfaces. Because water and water vapor can not pass through the glaze, water can be trapped behind the glaze and the brick may spall during freezing temperatures. Thus, some of the details of construction are changed to provide more barriers to water entering the walls and to provide other means to extract water from the walls.

Before a design in glazed brick is considered, a number of documents should be read: Glen-Gery Brickwork Design Profile 4p7, which addresses the characteristics of glazed brick (available from your Glen Gery dealer), the Brick Institute of America’s Technical Note of Brick Construction 13, Ceramic Glazed Brick Facing for Exterior Walls, which addresses design considerations, and a number of other BIA Tech-Notes listed below.

Sadly, it has been our experience that single family houses and glazed brick do not go well together. Usually there is neither the necessary technical expertise nor the necessary finances available to design and use glazed brick and there have been failures for these reasons. Therefore, our second recommendation is that glazed brick should not be sold for use on exterior applications of residential construction.

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