Blending Off Range Brick Across a Troy Shopping Mall

What was wrong

The brick was not one color. The file records off-colored brick throughout the range, which on elevations this long reads as patches rather than as a blend.

The brick manufacturer hired the work, not the mall and not the mason. The company that made the brick treated the color of a building it had already supplied as its own problem.

What was done

Mineral stain, brushed on by hand. Not the whole wall: the file says a percentage of the off-colored brick was stained for a better blend, so the elevation still reads as the range it was specified as.

The file dates the project 1998 and counts twenty-one years to the 2019 signature. One of the two work frames carries a burned-in camera date of 5/15/99.

What twenty-one years prove

The file is blunt about dirt: "This building is dirty in many areas and the stained brick will get just as dirty as the unstained brick." Twenty-one years on it signs the building off as looking great. On the certification scale that is Platinum, the band covering twenty years and over.

The 2019 frames run from the Crate & Barrel storefront to a banded wall and a brick pier inside the entrance.

The signed file

Every certified job gets the same form, signed on the day someone goes back to the building. This is the one for case 268, transcribed beside the scan so it can be read on a phone and by a search engine.