In Central Europe, houses are still commonly built from brick at a structural level. (This includes multi-storey apartment blocks, commonly with some sections i

In Central Europe, houses are still commonly built from brick at a structural level. (This includes multi-storey apartment blocks, commonly with some sections implemented as cantilevered reinforced concrete - the block I live in is such an example.) It's rare to encounter a building here where bricks also form the facade however. Which aspect does your question relate to? The rest of your post is about aesthetics, so if a brick facade is what you're after, they are still very common in the UK, although much of that is old housing stock. My parents built their house with a brick facade in the 1980s with then-state-of-the-art insulation. (in Central Europe) There is a layer of (large) structural bricks (similar to [1]), followed by various elements of insulation, followed by smaller face bricks to form the visible exterior. (something like [2]) I suspect this was and is somewhat more expensive than simply plastering over the outermost insulation layer. The double shell makes re-insulating with more modern materials prohibitively impractical. (Although the thermal properties of the house in question have held up pretty well.) On old houses, any visible bricks would have been structural, with effectively no insulation. So I'd imagine that's why it's no longer common. [1] https://www.wienerberger.at/bauen-mit-ziegeln/wandloesungen/aussenwandziegel-/jcr%3Acontent/root/hero/second-image/image.imgTransformer/hero-33x50/xl/1570542667662/pt_profi_mortar_5.jpg https://www.wienerberger.at/bauen-mit-ziegeln/wandloesungen/... [2] https://www.corobrik.co.za/assets/products/facebrick/58/1600/58.jpg https://www.corobrik.co.za/assets/products/facebrick/58/1600...