Most of the freeway walls you’re referring to are made using concrete forms and not block. I would feel extremely sorry for the company and the masons that would need to create block walls that are miles long, in no shade, during California’s summer.

I’ve worked for a masonry company for about four years and recently started my apprenticeship to become a brick block and stone mason a year ago. Working in this sector has made me truly appreciate the amount of work (Work = force*distance) that goes into any masonry. You see brick block and stone EVERYWHERE but what you might not realize is each brick, each block, each stone, has to travel from their source to their final destination. Usually that’s done by someone like me; if we’re lucky, we’re using M2 mobile hydro units coupled with a boom lift to reach whatever heights we need to hit. If we’re not so lucky, we’re building scaffolding by hand, stocking everything by hand, mixing mortar (in a mixer) by hand and using buckets to get the mortar where it need to be. It’s truly mind boggling and back breaking work. I realize this is an emerging technology but some of the masons I work with could reproduce work very close to this, maybe not mm accuracy but close enough where you’d never see the difference. And 3 months to lay ~15,000 bricks is an INSANELY long time. To put that number into perspective, a crew of 5 guys with average skill (3 masons, a laborer, and an operator making mud), given no extra equipment besides a mixer could pound out about 1000 brick in a day. That’s including everything from setup to cleanup.

Some of the guys I work with have been a mason for 40 years and they posses some incredible skill and can create amazing things and damn they’re fast too. The sad fact of the matter is most blueprints don’t want fancy masonry work anymore. It’s too cost prohibitive. We charge about $25/square foot of stone that’s without added arches or keystones or corbels etc; that also doesn’t include material costs (mortar, stone, tar paper, mesh, staples, etc). One experienced mason can throw up 100 square feet in a day, sometimes more given the differences in material. I wish we got contracts to create the beautiful buildings like in downtown Chicago or Milwaukee but it’s too much of a numbers game with real estate developers now. No one wants to pay us to create art, just slap it up and go man go!

With all that being said, man I’d like to have some time to play around with this tech! Or at least get to be the guy that holds the camera all day ;) looks like a breezy job compared to what I do everyday.