![]() Likewise, at the moment there is a rash of rusted corten steel, and an eruption of laser-cut perforated metal screens, creeping over the buildings of our cities – these are very modish right now, but in a few years they will be testaments to the (past) time of their design and construction, as all buildings and materials inevitably are.īecause, in fact, architectural fashions are far more than just frivolous or superficial fancies, they can tell us a lot about the values and concerns of a building’s culture, in a particular location, at a particular time. So what can we make of this resurgence, other than yet another spin on the wheel of architectural fashion? Building materials come and go my childhood home in the late 1970s had faux venetian glass in the windows and timber shakes on the roof – the very height of style at the time. It’s no coincidence that many of the contemporary architects are choosing to paint theirs. Partly it was their materiality – concrete blockwork can be hard to love, especially in its untreated forms, and breezeblocks are made of a particularly scratchy and drab variety. In fact, I thought they were hideous an irredeemably ugly vestige of another time, banal and styleless, they reminded me of everything I hated about suburbia. Of course, I didn’t always see the beauty in a breeze block. A breeze block screen wall can be a beautiful thing – the pattern of each individual block adding to a greater whole, and a larger pattern, when they’re used en masse. Breeze blocks expand the architect’s repertoire and ability to manipulate the wall with different degrees of solidity and permeability, openness and enclosure. You can make permeable walls out of timber or sheet materials or even bricks, but you won’t get quite the same effect as breeze blocks provide: a durable screen which is private and secure, offers sun shading and weather protection and ventilation, and has the added bonus of being highly patterned with geometric ornament. But in the case of the breeze block it seems to me more than that – because these “concrete masonary units” (as they’re technically called) actually have qualities that don’t exist in other materials. ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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