Ami Somdatta NhawkarTASCHEN
The Brick House by IStudio Architecture shows red bricks' beauty as the sun sets. The backyard opens up into the forest behind.
Malgorzata Replinska TASCHEN
An intimate gig takes place under an umbrella of red brick at the CKK Jordanki Congress and Cultural Center in Torun, Poland. This building takes brick laying to the extreme by using crushed bricks and concrete to create the effect you see inside the building.
www.reneriller.it TACHEN
The Puni Distillery in Glorenza serves as Italy's first and only whiskey distillery. The bulk of the production happens beneath these red brick arches.
Iwan Baan TACHEN
The artists' residency blends into its surroundings in Sinthian, a small Senegalese village. While bricks were used for the walls, local earth and thatch were used for the sloping roof that moves like a wave over the building.
Parham Taghiof TASCHEN
This red-brick office building is patterned with traditional brick layering techniques to respect local context.
Iwan Baan TACHEN
Opened in 2016, the new wing of the Tate Modern, which includes both over- and underground galleries -- expanded the museum's gallery space by 60%.
Stijn Bollaert TACHEN
An unusual green- and red-brick building was built to provide a central meeting place in this small town.
Sebastian Wiswedel TASCHEN
The tower of the state archive of North Rhine Westphalia rises 249 feet out of a historic brick warehouse.
Joao Morgado TACHEN
This red brick box theater in a small village just outside of Barcelona was commissioned as part of a public investment in cultural facilities. Designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, the seemingly windowless building consists of two parts: one containing a 300-seat auditorium and the other housing the theater's offices.
Courtesy Tachen
A new book by Tachen explores some of the most awe inspiring brick buildings from around the world, from residential homes in Vietnam to the Tate Modern Switch House in London these contemporary builds show how the brick has stood the test of time.
CNN  — 

“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”

Or so said the German-American architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in a 1959 interview with the New York Herald Tribune. At the time brick might not have been considered the most fashionable of materials, but Mies was a longtime supporter of the solid block.

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He’s not the only one: From the palaces Ming Dynasty and the monuments of the Middle East, to the solid brick walls of the Kremlin and the ornate, opposing red brick towers of London’s St Pancras International station, brick is one of the most recognizable and surprisingly picturesque materials across the world.

Brick construction dates back as far as 7500 BC, when, in modern Syria, people were using sun-dried bricks to construct dwellings. (The fired bricks we’re more used to today didn’t appear until 3500 BC.)

Such is their historic importance that bricks were even name-checked in the Biblical Book of Genesis, when people sought to “make bricks and burn them thoroughly” to construct the Tower of Babel.

Brick’s use and popularity has not feigned one bit over the millennia, and remains popular today, as the images in “100 Contemporary Brick Buildings,” a new title from architecture writer Philip Jodidio, demonstrate. Take a look at the gallery above for some of today’s most extraordinary examples.

“100 Contemporary Brick Buildings” by Philip Jodidio, published by Taschen, is out now.