Calculated Curvature
Bends that use fewer bricks.
Crankles is curious about obscure and interesting words and ideas from construction and engineering.
A crankle is a bend. A crinkle-crankle wall is a wall built in bends. A straight wall one brick thick is not stable in wind, so builders usually make it two bricks thick. Bend the plan from side to side and each bay works like a shallow arch laid on its side. In our model of a Suffolk garden wall, that takes 1,760 bricks where the straight wall takes 2,728, a saving of 35% in this model.
Fig. 1A Suffolk bay
35%
The wavy wall uses fewer bricks than the straight wall, which had to be built twice as thick. The figure is the saving on a bay of this shape, in this model.