I came across brick wall designs today where the architects were considering various options with pulled bricks. This design approach has been used before in many different ways but the basic principle is always the same: In a brick wall that is dominated by stretchers, you insert strategically placed headers which then protrude a little bit beyond the brick wall surface. This creates a very nice pattern with interesting shadows. The first image below shows such a design in a SketchUp model:

A wall with evenly pulled bricks

Given that in reality these are placed manually it may be reasonably easy (and therefore not too costly) to vary the extend of their extension beyond the surface and thereby create more interesting undulating patterns. One such pattern is shown below:

And one with a sinusoidal pattern

As it turns out, this is very easy to do by simply modifying some of the scripts from Chapter 7 and combining coding with a carefully created SketchUp model. The secret for success is having a component type (the headers) that is named differently than everything else in your model.

TIP:
Want to use this without coding? This script is also in one of the tools of my Scale By Tools extension.

The video below describes the entire process from set-up to finish and shows three solutions: uniform, random, and wave bricks. The code is also included below. Combine it with a SketchUp model of your own and you can recreate this in no time.

Of course, an interesting next task would be to find a way to communicate the brick pull dimensions to the builder, which is also reasonably easy since the extensions distances that this script generates only need to be added to the model (e.g. as text at the brick locations and placed on their own layer).

Tutorial Video

Code Snippet

Paste the following into the Ruby Code Editor and edit to your needs (e.g. rename the brick component).

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