Visible To The Naked Eye

Here’s the side wall of a building constructed about twenty-five years ago:

I used this building not because its construction was particularly bad – it is not – but because the glazed brick veneer on this side wall does a nice job of catching the raking sunlight. The brick color is uniform in the way that modern brick can be and old brick never was, so all of the variations are the result of out-of-plane imperfections either catching the sunlight or casting a slight shadow. (On a side note, raking light is enormously helpful in looking at walls. You can make your own with a powerful flashlight if you’re not lucky enough to have the sun right where you want it.)

In short, there are a number of small out-of-plane bulges and/or indentations. “Ripples” might be a good word to describe them. They’re not very big (in the out-of-plane direction), they’re not cumulative (the surface goes in and out to both sides of the theoretical perfect plane), and they’re not in themselves dangerous assuming they date from the original construction (if they were the results of the internal wall ties failing, all bets are off).

Here’s the thing: the ripples probably don’t even qualify as “construction defects.” A commonly-used masonry specification allows for out-of-plumb deviations along a vertical line of 1/4 of an inch in 10 feet, 3/8 of an inch in 20 feet, and 1/2 inch total. I’m fairly sure those ripples are all below 1/4 of an inch, which means they meet the spec, which means that the ripples don’t qualify as a defect. This is where the glazed brick and continuous running-bond hurt: rougher surfaces and any kind of break in the brick patterning would help hide this kind of minor problem.

In the larger scheme of things, and in an engineering sense, this is a non-issue. That’s fine with me: there are enough real problems with buildings that there’s no need to go inventing problems that don’t otherwise exist. On the other hand, anyone can see the ripples and to someone unfamiliar with the construction of this wall, they might seem like a problem.