Places — 7 min —
Why Herat builds in brick
Six centuries of continuous practice, and a kiln tradition that never had a reason to stop.
Herat's brickwork is the most developed in the country and the reason is unglamorous: the clay is right, the fuel was available, and the demand never lapsed long enough for the skill to be lost.
What that produced is a working vocabulary rather than a heritage style. The basketweave and herringbone bonds on new houses in Bagh-e Azadi are the same bonds as on the fifteenth-century minarets, laid by people who learned them from people who were laying them commercially the whole time.
It also produced a labour market. A Herati bricklayer can execute a decorative bond at ordinary wall rates, which means the ornament on a house there costs a fraction of what the same detail would cost in Kabul, where it would be specialist work.
This is the single biggest reason that houses in Herat look the way they do, and it has nothing to do with taste.
