When I arrived at the old Seagram’s plant I work at, one of the colossal brick barrel warehouses was in rather sad shape.  The outer facade of brick (each wall is two courses of brick deep) on about half the building had separated from the inner wall and begun sloughing off in often giant chunks.  The west-facing wall’s facade was almost entirely gone.

Our plans for much greater production volumes dictated that we save the building.  So last year we stripped off the outer facade and stabilized the structure and inner walls.  After some major design work this summer — including laser-mapping the half of the building we needed to rebuild after finding none of the structure was quite square — we finally began re-bricking the facade this fall.  No preform panels here — the “out-of-squareness” precluded them, so it’s coming back one brick at a time.  This is a very cool project at a very cool plant.  Here are some pictures: