Geobrickology, Part 16: Getting Too Close to the Flame; Elks Lodge No. 705, Stolp Island, Aurora, Illinois, USA (1926)

The 1920s were a fascinating time in American architecture. Street-corner shoebox banks and provincial high schools were the last neoclassical gasps of the Beaux Arts movement, but the Art Deco style was rolling in hard and fast, and it created its own sleek and sophisticated versions of the skyscraper, the apartment block, and the commercial building.

But there were also some interesting eddies that went spinning off the main current in their own wayward directions. Movie palaces and park fieldhouses were clothed in the Spanish Baroque or "Moorish" exoticism. And these were also the days when newspapers trumpeted tales of archaeologists discovering ruins previously hidden in the Central American rainforest. Suddenly many architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, were consumed with a mania for the Mayan. Or what was supposed to be Mayan, at any rate.

And so we come to one of my favorite buildings on the planet, tucked into its own corner lot on Aurora's urbanized isle in the Fox River. It is so essentially wacko and gloriously noncontextual that it takes about of an hour of walking around it and looking at it to comprehend all of its eccentricities.

It's supposed to be Azteco-Mayan in design, but I doubt that any self-respecting representative of either culture would really recognize it as such. But so what? It's different, it's interesting, and it's instructively outrageous.

First and foremost, there's its brick. I've come across no source that identifies where it was made, but it's of the clinker type. That means the bricks were placed so near the heat source of the kiln as to partially vitrify (fuse into glass), and to get blackened and deformed in the process. I'm not sure if the architects (Zimmerman, Saxe and Zimmerman) specified that they be made this way, or just used brickyard rejects to their own good effect. In any case, the clinkers give the building's masonry a remarkably disheveled look. And I mean that as a compliment.

Just how deformed some of these bricks are will become more apparent in following close-ups. But even at this range the details of the buff-colored frieze and second-floor cladding band begins to stand out. These look like Salem ("Bedford," "Indiana") Limestone, but in fact they're molded units produced by the American Terra Cotta Company in McHenry County, Illinois.

To see the other photos and descriptions of this series, pay a visit to my Geobrickology album.

Taken in: United States / Illinois / Aurora Township / Aurora (show map)

Taken on: February 28, 2019

Tags:

brick

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geology

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masonry

Aurora, Illinois

Elks Lodge No. 705

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American Terra Cotta Company

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Sets appears in: • Architectural Geology: Northeastern Illinois Exclusive of Chicago • The Beauty of Building Materials more » • Geobrickology • Natural History: Illinois • Terra-Cottalogy • Urban Exposures: La città esaminata « less

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Camera: NIKON COOLPIX A10, 34mm, ISO 80 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	NIKON COOLPIX A10
Focal Length:	34mm
ISO:	80
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
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