These buildings span 4,000 years, but they’re all built with the same material
Bricks have been a staple building material for at least 9,000 years, and the invention of fired bricks around 3,500 BCE opened up new and exciting possibilities for design and architecture. The ancient temples of Bagan, Myanmar, showcase the amazing possibilities of brickwork. Among the 3,595 temples, stupas, and spiritual structures built between the 11th and 13th century, Dhammayangyi Temple is renowned for its intricate design. The mud-mortar brickwork is so seamless, it's said you can't fit a pin between the bricks.
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Standing for over 4,000 years, the Ziggurat of Ur was built around 2100 BCE and uses both baked and unbaked mud bricks. It's one of the best-preserved buildings from the time. The pyramid-like structure has a flat top for a temple or fort, which unfortunately hasn't survived.
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Commissioned by King Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE, the Ishtar Gate of Babylon showcases bulls, lions and dragons parading across 38-feet (11.5 meters) of blue-glazed bricks. The gate is now in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, while Iraq is home to a replica.
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At over 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometers) long, the Great Wall of China is the world's longest man-made structure. Construction began around the 3rd century BCE, and the wall was continuously added to for nearly 2,000 years. During this time, construction techniques ranged from rammed earth to fired clay bricks held together with a lime and rice mortar.
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Italy has no shortage of incredible architecture, but the Duomo Florence stands out with its enormous brick and mortar dome. Construction started on the cathedral in 1296 but work on the dome didn't begin until 1418. The structure is actually two domes, one inside of the other. The outer shell is made of 4 million specially shaped bricks.
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Red sandstone rubble from over 20 Hindu temples was used in the construction of the Qutub Minar in Delhi, India. Measuring 239.5 feet (73 meters) in height, it's one of the tallest minarets in Asia.
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In the middle of the UNESCO heritage site of Vilnius's old town in Lithuania, St Anne's Church started life as a wooden structure. It burned down in 1419 and was rebuilt using red clay bricks in the extravagant gothic architectural style of the time.
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Saint Basil's Cathedral's whimsical, fairy tale-like exterior is probably one of the most famous examples of Byzantine architecture and Orthodox Russian art. While the cathedral, in Moscow's Red Square, was always eye-catching with its red bricks, the iconic bulbous domes didn't gain their striking multi-colored appearance until the 17th century.
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Situated within Kew Botanical Gardens in London, Kew Palace is the smallest of Britain's royal residences. It showcases Dutch architectural design, such as the curving attic gables and "Flemish bond" brickwork (where alternating long and short sides of the brick are laid). Built by Flemish merchant Samuel Fortrey, it was known as 'The Dutch House' before it was leased by King George II.
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The Tate Modern art gallery in London started life as the Bankside Power Station. It was built in 1947 using more than four million bricks. In 1995, renovation work started to gut the old power station, leaving nothing but the brick exterior and steel frame. The brick chimney towers 325 feet (99 meters) above the city, just lower than the dome of St Paul's Cathedral across the River Thames.
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The Institute of Art and Archeology, in Paris, was begun in 1925. Architect Paul Bigot took inspiration from classic Italian renaissance and gothic design. A brick terracotta frieze depicts scenes from classical art, in keeping with the building's purpose.
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Lauchhammer, Germany, was an industrial town centered around a coke plant (a type of fuel made from burning coal and oil without air). The fortress-like cylindrical bio-towers, built in 1950s, cleaned the wastewater produced by the coke plant. The bio-towers ceased operation in 2002 and were turned into a visitor center, to commemorate the region's industrial past.
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In a small village in the southern Sahara in Mali, Tanouan Ibi Primary School features some very unusual brickwork. Made from earth excavated on site, the bricks are un-fired and hydraulically compressed. According to Dutch architects Levs Architecten, the bricks are a blend of clay, sand, and laterite mixed with cement to make them water-resistant.
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Designed by award-winning architect Fernando Menis, the CKK Jordanki Congress and Cultural Center in Torun, Poland, was built in 2015 to evoke the traditional brickwork of the nearby Old Town of Toruń. It is renowned for its incredible acoustics and unusual modular structure.
