The other day I was parked outside a local Recreation Center that was built no more than 10 years ago. The 2 story building was either brick or brick faced. I noticed something I don't recall ever seeing on a brick building before.
The wall I was looking at had 2 banks of large windows on the first floor and a double-door entry way in the middle. Picture 2 conference rooms on either side of the entryway, with almost wall to wall, almost floor to ceiling windows. There were no windows or openings on the second floor.
Along the left edge of the entry way and each bank of windows, there appeared to be an expansion joint, filled with an off-white material, running from the top left corner of the opening straight up to the roof line.
I'll tell ya, it didn't look very nice. If you can picture where these joints were (along the left edge of each opening) you can see that they were not evenly spaced along the building, so they looked very out of place. They broke the second story brick wall up into 3 uneven sections.
My grandfather was a mason who built some the massive brick paper factories in Massachusetts as well as a number of brick houses. As far as I recall, none of these buildings had expansion joints like the one's on this rec building.
Anybody have an idea of why this was done?