A new book hopes to improve the image and status of brick in the history ofarchitecture. Frank McDonald reports.

Robin Walker once declared that he hated brick. What he was referring to, however, was the insistence of planners that new office buildings in sensitive locations should be clad in brick rather than, say, glazed curtain walls.

As a founding partner of Scott Tallon Walker, he thought there was something dishonest about using clay brick as a skin for buildings made from reinforced concrete or steel. And many other modernist architects would have agreed with him.

Walker's own Bord Fáilte head office has infill panels of brick - but they are grey concrete brick, rather than traditional fired clay brick. Thus, they are meant to be "read" as panels sandwiched between the structural elements of the building.

Though more brick was produced during the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined, it somehow became unfashionable as a building material compared to steel, concrete and glass, at least in the eyes of modernists.

A new book, Brick A World History, attempts to rehabilitate brick as a building material by illustrating its long history of use over the past 10,000 years - indeed, since the dawn of civilisation, when buildings began to be made to last.

Mud brick was invented before 8,000 BC, moulded brick about 5,000 BC - in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) - and fired brick in about 3,500 BC. The latter was the most significant development as it made permanent structures possible.

Fired bricks were much prized, as the book notes. Records surviving from the third Dynasty of Ur in Mesopotamia (2111 to 2003 BC) show that, for a single piece of silver, you could buy 14,400 mud bricks but only 504 fired bricks. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were made of brick. So was the Great Wall of China, the largest man-made object on Earth. And Hagia Sophia, which was the biggest building in the world for almost 1,000 years, and the temples of Burma, too.

The book's author, James W P Campbell, a lecturer in architecture at Cambridge, travelled around the world twice and visited more than 20 countries in search of prime examples of brick architecture, inevitably making a personal selection.

As he says, most people think of bricks as being red. "In fact, they have been produced in every colour under the sun, including the pale yellows of the desert, the bright green glazes of the Middle East, the purples and the purples and blacks of so-called Staffordshire Blues".

The ruins of ancient Rome, such as the great Baths of Caracalla, reveal the truth of their construction in brick. The marble or stone cladding that once adorned their façades was ripped off over the centuries by looters, including more than a few popes, for newer buildings.

And while most of the great medieval cathedrals were made of stone, the author highlights the soaring walls of the fortified cathedral of Albi, in southwestern France, as a monument to brick construction; it took 200 years to build after the bloody purge of the Albigensians in 1276.

During the Renaissance period, the greatest triumph in brick was Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence - commonly known as the Duomo. An extraordinary construction, it was built in brick because it could be more easily shaped than stone.

Whatever the impression one might get from architectural historians, Campbell insists that brick remained one of the most important building materials of the Italian Renaissance - even though, as in Roman times, it was more often than not faced with stone or marble.

England in the same period saw such notable examples of brick construction as Hampton Court Palace, while brick was also used to build all the gable-fronted houses of Amsterdam. It might even have been seen as a more "Protestant" building material than stone.

The use of brick (and stone, too) was given a powerful boost by the Great Fire of London in 1666, after which new building regulations outlawed the use of timber-frame construction because of its fire hazards. Most of Christopher Wren's buildings were also made from brick.

The author does not mention Georgian Dublin, though we all know that its construction came about through bringing in bricks as ballast on ships. The warmth of the houses on its squares contrasts with the dourness of Georgian Edinburgh, which was mostly built of stone.

Nash's great terraces in London were more deceptive - built of brick and then rendered in painted plaster, or stucco. He was the first architect to use "Roman Cement", patented by the Rev James Parker in 1796, which was made from ground clay and lime found in the Thames estuary.

The manufacture of brick, like so many other things, became more mechanised in the 19th century with new types of kiln that could fire thousands at a time, and brick was used extensively in constructing railway viaducts, canals and the sewers that sanitised English cities.

Glazed terracotta and the use of polychromatic brick became very fashionable in public buildings, largely through the influence of Ruskin.

But it was Gaudi who demonstrated the value of using brick as a structural element in realising some of his "organic architecture" in Barcelona.

In the US, where brick had been used since the colonial period in neo-classical churches, courthouses and mansions, Frank Lloyd Wright gave it new form in his Prairie-style houses to emphasise the horizontal. It also happened to be cheaper than stone and longer-lasting than timber.

In the Netherlands, during the early decades of the 20th century, the real difference between two architectural movements lay in their choice of materials: the Amsterdam School favoured traditional brick while the more modernist De Stijl group preferred steel and concrete.

Hilversum Town Hall, built in the 1920s, was one of the most influential buildings of the period - modernist in conception, but using traditional materials - and it obviously had an impact on such eminent architects as Aalvar Alto and Louis Kahn, both of whom used brick in many of their projects.

More recently, Renzo Piano's use of glazed terracotta brick stacked in metal frames in the IRCAM extension next to the Pompidou Centre in Paris was so stunning that its repetition elsewhere - notably in Piano's own buildings in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz - has almost become a cliché. In the 1990s, brick was brought to new levels of refinement by Michael Hopkins's new theatre at Glyndebourne, in the south of England, Rick Mather's extension to Keble College in Oxford and Mario Botta's incredibly powerful cathedral at Evry, just south of Paris, with trees circling its top.

Brick has also become an appropriate technology for developing countries as it can be produced locally - unlike steel, aluminium and cement. And though the greatest deterrent to its use in Ireland comes from insatiable bricklayers, it seems unlikely to go entirely out of favour.

Last week, the RIAI Gold Medal for architecture was presented to deBlacam and Meagher, in association with Boyd Barrett Murphy O'Connor for a major extension to the Cork Institute of Technology - the library and information technology wings - that are essays in the imaginative use of brick.

Brick A World History by James W P Campbell, with photographs by Will Pryce, is published by Thames and Hudson at £39.95 sterling.