Masonry Magazine August 1967 Page. 9
An 8 foot toll, 4 inch thick brick wall just failed and collapsed under a compressive load of almost 400,000 pounds. The ultimate strength of this test specimen was in excess of 4,000 psi.
STRUCTURAL RESEARCH
The "Father" of the Contemporary Bearing Wall
By M. H. Allen, Director of Research
Structural Clay Products Research Foundation
A Division of SCPI
Probably no concept for the use of clay masonry has created more interest and excitement in the building industry in the United States during recent years than that of SCPI's "Contemporary Bearing Wall". Since before the turn of the century and the advent of the structural building frame, brick and structural clay tile masonry had gradually been relegated to the position of non-structural building components used primarily to enclose structural frames or to sub-divide interior spaces as non-bearing partitions. Only in low rise buildings, where archaic code limitations and "rule-of-thumb" design methods permitted, were clay masonry walls used to any great extent as structural load-bearing elements. Present day costs of building ruled out the use of load-bearing brick walls such as those in the multi-story Monadnock Building in Chicago, built in 1891.
As far back as 1951 the Structural Clay Products Research Foundation (now a division of Structural Clay Products Institute), then only a year old, undertook an
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