#BREEZE WAY BLOCKS SKIN#

It is of course a well-known strategy to take the most passe thing you can find and re-appropriate it, for shock value, and to jolt everyone into seeing it anew. Right now we are in the midst of a resurgence of interest in postwar design: the wild popularity of all things mid-century modern (or mid-mod, or MCM) has spread beyond furniture and houses to materials, and the breeze block has been carried along on that tide. In commercial buildings, they were often used for stairwells, balcony screening, and curtain wall sun-shading to large windows. Breeze blocks are not (usually) structural, hence they were often used where a garden meets a house – patio screens or carports or garden walls.

#BREEZE WAY BLOCKS SKIN#

The breeze block can also be linked more broadly to the tradition of the brise soleil, which refers to any kind of sun baffle installed outside the skin of a building (which is where the sun screens should be! Stop the heat before it enters your building envelope!). Inspired by the ornamentation on Mayan temples, the relief patterns on Lloyd Wright’s blocks are only slightly reminiscent of what we in Australia would call a breeze block (or screen block, or pattern block, or cinder block) because they are much less permeable – really his is a wall system, rather than a screen one. Millard House, also known as La Miniatura, is a textile block house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1923 in Pasadena, California.

Some people credit Frank Lloyd Wright with inventing them, and indeed he did invent a precast concrete “textile block” system, which he used on several houses in Los Angeles including the Millard and Ennis Houses. Patterned concrete blocks have a long (and sometimes celebrated) lineage.

Meanwhile on Pinterest it’s fascinating to see patterns and shapes from other countries – some highly inventive and very beautiful, a long way from the one or two rather stolid designs that were standard in the Adelaide suburbs of my childhood. Marshall has been collecting images of breezeblocks for sixteen years, and has more than nine thousand followers. You only need to dip into the Instagram feed of Sydney architect Sam Marshall, aka to see the architectural community (including me, I’ll admit) collectively drooling over the multifarious screens, walls, fences, stairwells, undercrofts, carports, and garden rooms that this versatile material lends itself to.

James Russell Architect, Naranga Avenue House.

Breeze way blocks