[2rsf]

They are complementing each other, concrete is a terrible heat insulator, hard to work with (requires molds and steel reinforcements), heavier than bricks which requires a stronger design, hard to live with (think of drilling, moving walls), more expensive than bricks (depending on the exact usage though) and gives no benefits over bricks in terms of strength.

Bricks are used to build the bulk of walls, and concrete is used in floors and reinforcement of the walls and above/around doors and windows

[jokoon]

What are the other disadvantage of brick? I guess you cannot make 4+ stories buildings with it?

[dirtyid]

Unreinforced masonry, like a church, are extremely inefficient in terms of material and labor, think 6 foot deep walls that taper up to carry load. Optimally, bricks work in conjunction with reinforced concrete skeleton for modern construction. Cost is also a big factor, especially in developed countries, more so for high quality finishes. There's a case for small brick constructions in less developed countries with high unemployment and low wages.

In terms of embodied energy, brick veneer (composite of materials with a layer of exterior brick) typically have the best life-cycle ecological performance, 20%-60% better, compared to curtain wall (glass+steel) and precast concrete panels, across many climates and regions. Engineered wood for buildings is probably the better option in the long run. There's a lot of movement recently, construction is a very slow and conservative industry though. Probably need for results to be validated. A lot of claims are by industry publications. But intuitively it feels right.

[Sharlin]

I'm not sure what the GP means. Precast concrete elements have been a ubiquitous building material since the 60s, exactly because they're much cheaper to make and build from than brick walls.

[2rsf]

that's not how it works, nowadays concrete columns are the thing that supports the weight of the building, the space between the columns is then filled with bricks.

Floors are usually made of thinner concrete, although sometimes a design of concrete mesh is used to save weight with the gaps filled with Styrofoam or light bricks, and then a thin layer of concrete is poured on it to serve as the foundation to the floor tiles.

The concrete floors also serve an important goal of supporting and delivering horizontal forces in the building.

This means that there is no technical limit to the height of bricks buildings, although there might be practical reasons not to use them.

Below is an example of how it looks [0]

In the not so distant past bricks used to carry the load of the building, and indeed that has limitations to how high buildings can be,

[0] https://globalist.in/tk-cement-interlock-brick-kuttippuram/b...

[animal531]

Googling shows the tallest regularly shaped building to be 16 floors high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building