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, the crinkle-crankle design needs 1,760 bricks against 2,728 for a straight wall of the same length, a saving of 35%.
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. Why a one-brick wall stands