Arch-Anatomy – Wood Bricks | The Designer's Assistant

This is the first of a series of articles on the anatomy of architecture which focuses on construction details. Many of them are details that are now obsolete because of modern building methods or the evolution of designs due to changing tastes.

(An expanded explanation of an obscure but interesting entry in the Wrand Film Design Glossary.)

If you try to search for ‘wood bricks’ on the internet, you’ll probably come up with some strange answers. They were a standard feature of brick construction in the nineteeth century that went out of fashion for a number of reasons.

With masonry building construction there has always been the problem of attaching wood elements to stone or brick structures. This was often accomplished by inserting wood plugs into the wall surfaces as an attachment point for nails, or by driving nails into the mortar of joints.

A wood plug in a stone wall of a 17th century Paris hotel.

From a 19th century builders manual showing the use of wood plugs for attaching a door frame.

Wooden plugs in early 20th century brick.

The use of ‘wood bricks’ most likely evolved in England before spreading to America. Most building manuals of the period that mention their use suggest using well-seasoned hardwood billets set between the brick courses at intervals for a way of attaching the wood linings for doorways and window framing.

For narrower wall opening, this lining could consist of a single board like in the illustration below.

Use of a single plank as a door frame lining for a brick wall. Note that the wood bricks are also used to attach the grounds at the door frame for plasterwork. The architrave exhibits typical Neo-colonial profiles, while the bolection mould on the doors frame is a mould typical of Greek Revival houses, a quirked Greek ogee and bevel combined with a fillet and cove, topped with an astragal, fillet, and cove.

For larger openings in thicker walls, the wood bricks were made longer and the linings were made of several pieces of sawn and planed boards, assembled in what was called a skeleton framed jamb.

The skeleton frame is attached to the wood bricks as well as the wood lintel.

Early manuals show this framework to be mortised and tenoned similar to a frame for furniture, but some mid-ninteeth century examples in America have been observed to be simple vertical boards nailed to the wood bricks rather than a M&T frame. This method would have definitely cut down on the construction time.

The image on the left shows the wood bricks in place while the image on the right shows the vertical boards nailed to them to act as the arch frame lining. Notice the archway lining at the top with boards that have been kerfed at regular intervals to allow the wood to form to the brick archway without having to steam bend them.

Some turn-of-the-century buildings display a more haphazard approach to wood bricks where framing cut offs of softwood were used instead of hardwood, as in the photos below.