Masonry | Materials, Techniques, & History (2024)

masonry, the art and craft of building and fabricating in stone, clay, brick, or concrete block. Construction of poured concrete, reinforced or unreinforced, is often also considered masonry.

The art of masonry originated when early man sought to supplement his valuable but rare natural caves with artificial caves made from piles of stone. Circular stone huts, partially dug into the ground, dating from prehistoric times have been found in the Aran Islands, Ireland. By the 4th millennium bce, Egypt had developed an elaborate stonemasonry technique, culminating in the most extravagant of all ancient structures, the pyramids.

The choice of masonry materials has always been influenced by the prevailing geological formations and conditions in a given area. Egyptian temples, for example, were constructed of limestone, sandstone, alabaster, granite, basalt, and porphyry quarried from the hills along the Nile River. Another ancient centre of civilization, the area of western Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates, lacked stone outcroppings but was rich in clay deposits. As a result, the masonry structures of the Assyrian and Persian empires were constructed of sun-dried bricks faced with kiln-burned, sometimes glazed, units.

Stone and clay continued to be the primary masonry materials through the Middle Ages and later. A significant development in masonry construction in ancient times was the invention of concrete by the Romans. Although well-cut blocks of stone masonry could be erected without benefit of mortar, the Romans recognized the value of cement, which they made from pozzolanic tuff, a volcanic ash. Mixed with water, lime, and stone fragments, the cement was expanded into concrete. Walls of this concrete, faced with various stone or fired-clay materials, were more economical and faster to erect than walls made of stone blocks.

Because it provided more freedom in shaping structures, concrete helped the Romans develop the arch into one of the great basic construction forms. Prior to the arch, all builders in stone had been handicapped by the stone’s fundamental lack of tensile strength—that is, its tendency to break under its own weight when supported on widely separated piers or walls. The Egyptians had roofed temples with stone slabs but had been forced to place the supporting columns close together. The Greeks had used wooden roof beams covered with thin stone; such beams were subject to weather and fire. The Roman arch avoided tension entirely, keeping all the masonry in compression, from the keystone to the piers. Stone in compression has great strength, and the Romans built huge arched bridges and aqueducts in large numbers. Extending their arch into a tunnel, they invented the barrel vault, with which they successfully roofed such buildings as the Temple of Venus in Rome. Several arches intersecting at a common keystone could be used to form a dome, such as that of the Pantheon in Rome. Two intersecting barrel vaults gave rise to the groin vault, which was used in some of the great Roman public baths.

The Roman arch underwent a significant modification in the Middle Ages in the evolution of the pointed arch, which provided a strong skeleton resting on well-spaced piers. The massive, rigid masonry structures of the Romans gave way to soaring vaults supported by external flying buttresses (external bracing). The use of smaller-sized stones and thick mortar joints created an elastic, slender structure that stressed the masonry to its fullest. The bearing of unit upon unit required the use of mortar to distribute the contact stresses.

With the advent of Gothic forms, masonry construction in a historic sense had solved the problem of spanning space entirely by material in compression, the only design formula suitable to stone. With the advent of the truss in the 16th century, the rise of scientific structural analysis in the 17th century, and the development of high-tensile resistant materials (steel and reinforced concrete) in the 19th century, the importance of masonry as a practical material for spanning space declined. It owes its revival largely to the invention of portland cement, the principal ingredient of concrete, which in the 20th century returned unit masonry to its essentially pre-Roman role of forming vertical wall enclosures, partitions, and facings.

Masonry construction begins with extractive materials, such as clay, sand, gravel, and stone, usually mined from surface pits or quarries. The most widely used rocks are granite (igneous), limestone and sandstone (sedimentary), and marble (metamorphic). In addition to rocks, clays of varying types are manufactured into bricks and tiles. Concrete blocks are fabricated from cement, sand, aggregate, and water.

For the shaping and dressing of stone a great variety of tools can be used. These range from such hand-held tools as hammers, mallets, chisels, and gouges to machines including frame and circular saws, molding and surfacing machines, and lathes. There are also various appliances for handling stone at the building site, ranging from different forms of light hand tackle to machine-driven cranes.

Many architects value masonry for its colour, scale, texture, pattern, and look of permanence. In addition to its aesthetic appeal, masonry has a number of other desirable properties, such as its value in controlling sound, resisting fire, and insulating against daily fluctuations in temperature.

Beginning with 20th-century housing, masonry was frequently used over wood-stud construction. Cavity walls, highly resistant to moisture, were often built of two vertical layers of masonry separated by a layer of insulating material. Some foundations were built of concrete blocks, and many building codes required the use of masonry in fire walls.