The size of a brick!!

Today was a beautiful monsoon day in Bangalore. We are about 2 weeks away from the summer solstice .In most places in the northern hemisphere , it should be hotter than what it was in April and May with the sun beaming longer and at a more direct angle.But thanks to the monsoon clouds here in Bangaloreit is actually cooler, breezy and nice compared to April. All in all a perfect monsoon-summer day. Good day to go out. And that is what I did.

My idea of out was a construction site!!. My uncle is building a new house in north Bangalore so I decided to tag along to get a look at the construction. One of the things that struck me was how every brick has to be laid by hand and cemented one on top of the other and sideways and then it had to be individually checked for alignment. All this takes 4 persons about 3-4 minutes to lay one brick. One person to prepares the cement mix. One person is getting material for the cement mix. One person is passing a brick by hand to the last guy who lays the brick,cements and constantly adjusts the alignment. It is a painful process to perform.

So my mind working on increasing the efficiency of this process things like this. Why cant you get pre-cemented bricks. How many? Say about 5. This should not adversely affect the strength provided and will certainly cut the time to lay the bricks by atleast 5 times.Especially the laborious task of checking alignment. Plus machine cemented bricks give better alignment and consistency.

So I ask the contractor if this can be done. He tells me that the brick size is dependant not only on ease of laying it and strength to weight ratio but also how easily it can be transported. So when you get the bricks from the factory to the construction site it has to be individually lifted from the lorry and placed down on the ground. For this you need human strength, which means that only a brick with weight which can be lifted by a woman(because they are the ones who stand in line one by one and in a chain till some one places it on the ground) can be transported.
So even though it would save time in laying multiple pre-cemented bricks how are you going to transport such heavy bricks. I guess it comes down to cost of labour vs time spent. With labour being cheap you off course have enough manpower to lift and place each brick. But when labour becomes costly you make use of bigger bricks which can be transported using construction machines. Best is off course pre fabricated wood with which you can construct a house from start to finish in 15 days!!