Xbrick® is an innovative seating cuboid made of EPP and simultaneously a lightweight, modular piece of functional furniture for seating groups, shelves, tables, and stands. It can be assembled and disassembled intuitively and without tools.
The inspiration for the innovative new-work furniture Xbrick® was the time-honored sculptor’s stool, which Xbrick® inventor Michael Daubner created as a first wooden practice piece with dovetail joints at the Berchtesgaden Woodcarving School. In this archetypal form, the wooden cuboids serve the carvers as pedestals, stools, chairs, exhibition stands, and much more.
Years later, wd3_spatial design is looking for flexible, multifunctional furniture for agile office planning. In response to this need, Daubner and his team reinterpreted the archetypal sculptor’s stool with its tried-and-tested format and looked for an alternative material. After experimenting with cuboids made from recycled PET felt, the developers came up with EPP: a pure, extremely high-quality plastic known from medical and food technology, highly stable and very light. This makes the cuboid even more versatile. At just 1.4 kg, it is much lighter than its wooden relative and is also quiet, non-slip and shock-absorbent, yet just as stable.
The production of the cuboid with its precise geometry presents wd3 with a number of challenges. A partner is found in the Bavarian forest with whom it is possible to produce the Xbrick® in accordance with the high requirements. Short paths in development and production and long-term cooperation are important to wd3. This is why the Xbrick® is also assembled in the workshops of Diakonie Stetten e.V. – near Stuttgart.
The simple cuboid is quickly used by a wide variety of users: as office furniture for agile working, as a fitness element for workouts, in schools and kindergartens, at indoor and outdoor events.
For wd3, Xbrick® is a sustainable piece of furniture simply because of its multifunctionality and longevity: because if one piece of furniture is used for many different purposes over and over again, less needs to be bought and produced. At the end of a long product life, wd3 takes back used Xbrick® and ensures that it is reused or returned to the material cycle, as Xbrick® is 100% recyclable.
But the developers at wd3 are not stopping there and are continuing to search for an ecological, renewable raw material that is as light as EPP. Currently under development – and growing – is an Xbrick® made from mycelium. Mushroom fibers grow in a mold in a culture medium made of hemp fibers, forming solid, lightweight, voluminous bodies in just a few days. The complex ribbed structure of the Xbrick® – important for stability and lightness – is, however, a completely new challenge for the mycelium process. Two mycelium half-shells grow for the Xbrick®, which then grow together. Heat is used to deactivate the mushroom growth at the end – so that the Xbrick® Grow [working title] no longer continues to grow at home. The project is still under development, but everyone involved sees great potential in a lightweight multifunctional piece of furniture that grows entirely from renewable raw materials and is biodegradable.
Pictures: https://my.hidrive.com/share/ij1xdb2ihb
wd3 GmbH
Seidenstraße 57
70174 Stuttgart
Copyright © wd3 GmbH • 2025 •