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TriqBriqs: Unusable Wood Made Into Lego-Like Blocks for Homebuilding

Turning "calamity wood" into a precious resource

By Rain Noe - May 13

in Sustainability

From an environmental perspective, responsibly managed wood is undoubtedly the best building material. It literally grows out of the ground, it stores carbon, and it can be endlessly regenerated.

That being said, there's a lot of waste created in timber production. Not every tree that gets cut down is turned into usable timbers, and even the ones that are contain lots of discarded parts. Knots, defects and bug infestations can render parts of wood unusable in construction.

German startup TriqBriq has a high-tech solution that yields amusingly low-tech parts. "Thanks to our patented innovation, we can use the damaged and weak wood in a circular manner in structural timber construction," the company writes. They take undesirable wood, and even what the Germans call "calamity wood"—trees felled before their time due to bug infestations or climate disasters—and run them through their microfactory. There a series of industrial robot arms automatically cut, drill and assemble the wood into modular blocks.

These TriqBriqs are all uniform, and held together with nothing more than dowels and friction. There are no adhesives or fasteners.

The Briqs can be stacked, linked and locked into place with more dowels to form wall assemblies.

They can be shipped on pallets, and easily assembled on-site. Save for the mallet used to drive the connecting dowels in, it's no-tool assembly.

There's no framing required, just Lego-like stacking. Here are some workers building a house extension in seven hours using TriqBriqs:

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Comments

Christian Lockenwitz

6 months ago

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The featured building example has thick, solid walls with no insulation. Not really viable in temperate/cold climates, where I'm guessing condensation will accumulate at the dewpoint in the capillaries and cavities, and mould would build rapidly.

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- Prescott Perez-Fox
  
  Christian Lockenwitz
  
  6 months ago
  
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  You could use exterior rigid insulation and/or build an additional frame inside and use something like dense-pack cellulose. This is an option to replace masonry, but of course presents new hurdles based on material properties.
  
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Ryan Cee

6 months ago

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That transom over the door sure isn't gonna be calamity wood.

It's a nice idea, and the design is cool, but wow is that a lot of energy being used to process it. Given the square shapes and basic work process (planing/drilling) it seems like it could be done with a simpler mechanized line.

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- Dee An
  
  Ryan Cee
  
  6 months ago
  
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  For sure, prototype the process with general purpose robots, then scale it up by building a mechanised line.
  It depends on how much they expect to be able to scale. They say they want multiple small production cells near to the sources of timber*... So maybe a modular, transportable production line would be desirable.
  * Hmm. For shipping efficiency, the planed lengths of timber are just as compact as the finished 'bricks', so standard CNC planer could operate near timber source, and mechanised assembly occur elsewhere.
  
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