Light as Brick

Installed at EH Smith’s Clerkenwell Design Centre on St John Street, the work explores how materials can move beyond their conventional role in construction. Welded steel armatures support translucent glass and textured ceramic brick forms, illuminated internally with LEDs, challenging expectations of what a brick is supposed to be.

Bringing together architectural supply, design, and specialist fabrication, Light as Brick transforms brick products typically associated with façades and building envelopes into illuminated furniture and objects.

Developed by architect and designer Simon Astridge for EH Smith, with technical delivery and installation by Arcitile, the pieces reinterpret two distinctive raw materials from the EH Smith architectural range through a series of tables, columns and lighting pieces. 

A brick is supposed to be opaque, heavy, repeatable, structural, anonymous. The two materials at the centre of this installation are none of those things. One is translucent hand-cast glass made by Fornace Sant’Anselmo that captures and diffuses light and the other is a deliberately deformed, highly textured, brick from Terraformae, Sant’Anselmo’s experimental line.

The installation plays with contradiction, solidity and transparency, weight and lightness, refinement and erosion, and looks at what a brick can become when it is released from the wall. 

Both materials are shaped through fire-based manufacturing. The glass brick is blown and pressed in a Veneto furnace that has been active for over a century, and is part of Sant’Anselmo’s main product line. The eroded brick is fired at Terraformae, Sant’Anselmo’s experimental hub, where the kiln is treated as a place of controlled accident.

For EH Smith, the installation reflects an ongoing dialogue between material supply, architectural experimentation and creative collaboration. Known for supplying architectural façade systems, bricks and ceramic and terracotta cladding solutions across the UK, the company has worked closely with architects and designers for over a century to realise projects that push the application of traditional materials in new directions.

Light as Brick will be on display throughout the summer of 2026 at EH Smith’s Clerkenwell Design Centre, 38-42 St John St, London, EC1M 4DL.