Because I am dumb enough to serve on the board of my condominium association, one autumn afternoon in 2024 I found myself on the roof of my building watching a team of skilled masons rebuild a parapet wall. This was quite something to see. The placement of each brick involved not only the precise application of wet mortar but also the use of a spirit level, ensuring that each course lay not parallel to the 110-ish-year-old bricks below it but perpendicular to the gravitational center of the earth. And the work was fast—maybe two or three seconds per brick. When I try to retrieve a visual memory of it, I’m unable to do so without giving each mason three arms.
A few weeks earlier I had stood on the opposite side of our street as Brent, our masonry guy, propped samples against the wall of the building. All were close matches for the existing brick, and one was nearly exact: dark red and sensuously pitted, a texture evoking both rough pumice and Havarti cheese. Brent put in the order.
That’s not the brick the masons on our roof were laying. Like many buildings in…
