Extraordinary

Your ordinary brick is a ubiquitous building material that’s been used in architecture since ancient times: functional, cost-effective, commonplace. However, the architectural and spatial effects created with brick can be anything but ordinary. Australian architecture studio Benn+Penna used the humble brick for this rear addition to a bungalow on Sydney’s Lower North Shore. The studio designed three interlocking brick pavilions with carved-out spaces, creating a composition of solid, monolithic volumes and transparent, skeletal forms. “We talked about the building looking almost like a ruin,” says Andrew Benn, director of Benn+Penna. “The brick has a stone-like quality so the buildings appear to emerge out of the ground; and the emphasis on negative space makes the structure look quite ruinous.” The clients are parents of two teenaged children. Their existing brick bungalow…