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Some houses you can date from the street in about two seconds, and the giveaway is a wall that is not quite a wall. It is a screen of concrete blocks pierced with squares, crosses, and diamonds, standing in front of the porch, wrapping the carport, or guarding the entry court like lace made out of cement. Those are breeze blocks, and no single building material says mid century modern faster. Tract builders put them on ten dollar houses and famous architects put them on embassies, and for about twenty years they were everywhere the sun was hot.
This post covers the whole story: what a breeze block actually is, where the idea came from, the classic patterns and their names, what the blocks were for besides looks, where they were used, why they vanished, and why they are suddenly back in production. If you own a mid century house, there is a fair chance a wall of these is the first thing your guests photograph.
An Alexander tract house in Palm Springs, photographed by Carol Highsmith for the Library of Congress: the breeze block screen beside the carport and the pierced block fence out front were standard equipment on desert tract houses.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Quick Facts: Breeze Blocks
- What: decorative concrete blocks pierced with a pattern, stacked into screen walls that block sun and sightlines but pass air
- Also called: screen blocks, decorative concrete blocks, pierced blocks, and in Spanish, celosias
- Peak years: about 1950 to 1970, strongest in Florida, Arizona, California, Texas, Hawaii, and Las Vegas
- Standard sizes: most are nominal 8 by 8 inches square and about 4 inches thick, stacked with mortar like brick
- Famous patterns: square in square (Vista Vue), the X or cross, quatrefoil, diamond, and the circle in square
- High end ancestor: Edward Durell Stone's pierced concrete grilles, starting in the mid 1950s
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In this guide: What a breeze block is | Where they came from | The classic patterns | What they actually do | Where you see them | Indoors and the tropics | The comeback | Buying and restoring | FAQ
What Is a Breeze Block?
A breeze block is a concrete masonry unit with a hole pattern cast through it. That is the entire definition, and it is also the entire trick. A solid concrete block wall stops everything: sun, wind, view, and air. A breeze block wall stops the first three selectively and lets the air through, which in a hot climate before cheap air conditioning was not a style choice. It was air conditioning, or the closest thing a tract house budget could buy.
The blocks are small, usually eight inches square in face and about four inches thick, and they stack with mortar joints like oversized brick. One block is nothing. A wall of them, the pattern repeating fifty or a hundred times, becomes a textile in concrete, and that repetition is the look. Builders bought them from local concrete block plants, and every region had its own catalog of patterns, which is why a Miami screen wall and a Phoenix screen wall rhyme without ever matching.
The square in square pattern, stacked in bands on a 1960s parking garage in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The same block screened porches from Palm Springs to Miami; here it just went to work downtown.
Photo: Michael Steeber, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Where They Came From: Brise Soleil and Edward Durell Stone
The idea is older than the suburbs. Pierced screens are centuries old in hot countries, the mashrabiya of the Middle East and the jali of India, and Latin America's celosia tradition carried the idea into the Spanish speaking world. Modernism picked it up in the 1930s and 1940s as the brise soleil, the sun breaker: Le Corbusier and the Brazilian modernists used deep concrete grids to shade glass, and the device spread through the tropics anywhere modern architects worked in the heat.
The American popular version starts with one man and one building material. In the mid 1950s, architect Edward Durell Stone wrapped his buildings in pierced concrete grilles: the Stuart Pharmaceutical headquarters in Pasadena in 1956, and most famously the United States Embassy in New Delhi in 1959, where the white grille screen turned a modern box into something that glowed. Stone made the pierced screen respectable at the highest level of architecture. The block plants of America made it cheap. Within five years of the Stuart building, the same idea, simplified into stackable eight inch units, was going up in front of ranch houses by the subdivision.
The high end ancestor: Edward Durell Stone's Stuart Pharmaceutical building in Pasadena, 1956, its full length wrapped in a pierced concrete grille above a reflecting pool. The tract house breeze block is this idea at a workingman's price.
Photo: Bobskol854, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Classic Patterns
Patterns had names, and collectors use them. Regional block catalogs listed dozens, but a handful cover most of what still stands.
| Pattern | What it looks like | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Square in square (Vista Vue) | A smaller square floated inside the block's square frame | Everywhere; the best selling screen block in America |
| The X, or cross | A diagonal cross, often with a small star or circle at the center | California, including the Stahl House screens |
| Quatrefoil | A four petal flower or clover opening | Florida and commercial buildings; often alternated with squares |
| Diamond | A rotated square opening, sometimes doubled | Southwest and Hawaii |
| Circle in square | A round hole centered in the square block | Churches, motels, and garden walls |
| Rectangular slots | Plain horizontal or vertical slots, the modernist minimum | Commercial and institutional buildings |
Builders mixed patterns more often than purists admit. A porch screen might run square in square with a band of quatrefoil at the top, and commercial facades alternated two patterns across the whole wall. If you are documenting an original wall, photograph the whole elevation before you touch it: the pattern layout is part of the house's history.
The X cross pattern at the most famous Case Study house of all: the breeze block screen at Pierre Koenig's Stahl House, Case Study House 22, Los Angeles, 1960.
Photo: Codera23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What They Actually Do: Shade, Air, and Privacy
It is easy to treat breeze blocks as decoration, and the original buyers did not. A screen wall on the sunny side of a patio cut the heat load on the rooms behind it while keeping the breeze, which is where the name comes from. At a carport it hid the car and the oil stains from the street without closing in the space. At an entry court it gave the front door privacy from the sidewalk, so the door could stand open or the glass could stay uncovered. At a pool it fenced the water, passed the wind, and kept the yard from feeling like a cage.
The shadow show was the bonus nobody put in the brochure. Morning and evening sun through a screen wall prints the pattern across floors, walls, and patios in light, and the print moves all day. Ask owners what they would save first in a remodel and the shadow wall comes up again and again, ahead of the roofline, ahead of the fireplace. The photograph below is from Kuwait in the 1970s, where the same blocks and the same sun ran the pattern a decade longer than they did in the States.
The whole point, caught on film: sun through a screen wall printing its pattern across a house in Salmiya, Kuwait, where breeze blocks stayed standard into the 1970s.
Photo: Salwa Farwaneh Dameh, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Where You See Them: Carports, Porches, Churches, and Motels
On houses, the standard positions repeat across the Sun Belt: the carport screen, the entry court wall, the patio shade wall, the fence line, and the planter or garden wall. In the tract neighborhoods of Palm Springs and Las Vegas the block wall became part of the streetscape itself, house after house running its own pattern, so that whole blocks now read as a catalog you can drive through. Paradise Palms in Las Vegas, built by Palmer and Krisel in the early 1960s, is the textbook example, and its pierced garden walls are protected features of the neighborhood's identity today.
A William Krisel house in Paradise Palms, Las Vegas, behind its turquoise pierced block garden wall. In the tract neighborhoods, the pattern wall was not an accent. It was the fence, the facade, and the neighborhood's signature at once.
Photo: Kimberly har, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Commercial work: restaurants, motels, and churches
Businesses took the block further than houses did. A full screen facade gave a small commercial building a modern face, shade for its glass, and a sign-like pattern customers could spot from a moving car. Motels wrapped their walkways and pool courts in it, churches used it for bell walls and courtyard screens where it read as both modern and faintly ancient, and restaurants made whole dining room walls of it. The Baltimore restaurant screen below alternates square in square and quatrefoil blocks inside a stone frame, on a building that has served Chinese food on that corner since just after the war.
A full screen facade in Baltimore: square in square and quatrefoil blocks alternating inside a stone frame on a restaurant building that has stood on North Charles Street since the postwar years.
Photo: Eli Pousson / Baltimore Heritage, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Indoors and Out to the Tropics
The screen came inside early. Stone used his grille blocks as an interior screen at the Stuart building's atrium, filtering light between floors above a planted court, and tract houses followed with block partitions between entry and living room, block fireplace surrounds, and block room dividers in the fancier models. An interior block wall does the same work as the exterior one: it divides space without darkening it, which is exactly what an open plan house needs at its edges.
Inside the Stuart Pharmaceutical atrium in Pasadena: Stone turned his exterior grille into an interior screen wall above the planted court, and the idea filtered down to a thousand living room dividers.
Photo: Bobskol854, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The tropical screen at full scale
In Hawaii the idea scaled up to whole buildings. The Bank of Hawaii's Waikiki tower of 1966, by George "Pete" Wimberly, wraps itself in a scalloped concrete screen of overlapping arches, a brise soleil for a skyscraper that keeps the trade winds and drops the glare. It is not made of individual breeze blocks, but it is the same thought at civic scale, and it shows how deep the screen idea ran in the Pacific: shade is structure, and structure is the decoration.
The 1966 Bank of Hawaii Waikiki building, wrapped in its famous scalloped concrete sun screen. The breeze block's big brother, working at tower scale in the trade winds.
Photo: w_lemay, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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The Comeback: Gone by 1975, Back by 2015
Breeze blocks faded fast. Air conditioning got cheap, the energy crisis made holes in walls look wasteful in most of the country, and the 1970s taste for earth tones and rough textures had no use for crisp geometric screens. Block plants dropped the patterns from their catalogs one by one, molds were scrapped, and thousands of walls came down in remodels. For about thirty years the survivors were just old walls on old houses, waiting.
The revival rode in on the same wave as the rest of this blog: the mid century housing stock became collectible, Palm Springs turned its tract neighborhoods into a design pilgrimage, and a new generation met the shadow patterns on social media and went looking for the source. Block makers responded the way the market always does. Companies in Florida and the Southwest put the classic patterns back into production from surviving originals, and a search for breeze blocks today turns up both new production and salvaged originals. The yellow butterfly roof Krisel below, its entry court wrapped in the dark patterned screens Palmer and Krisel specified, shows what everyone is chasing: a wall that is a fence, a shade, and a signature at the same time.
A Krisel butterfly roof house in Paradise Palms, its entry court wrapped in dark screen blocks. Houses like this one carried the pattern through the decades when nobody wanted it.
Photo: Kimberly Harvey, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Buying and Restoring Breeze Blocks
Working with original screen walls is mostly patience. The blocks themselves are tough; the mortar joints and any steel reinforcing inside the wall are what fail. A few working rules:
- Document before you touch. Photograph the full wall and the pattern layout. Replacement blocks should match pattern, size, and thickness, and originals vary by maker more than you expect.
- Salvage first. Demolition yards in the Sun Belt and online listings for vintage screen blocks still turn up original runs. A salvaged block with sixty years of patina disappears into an original wall in a way a fresh one will not.
- Match mortar, not just block. A repointed wall with bright modern mortar reads new even with old blocks. Match the original joint color and profile.
- Paint is a one way door. Many walls were painted in the 1980s. Stripping paint from porous concrete block without damaging the face is slow, specialist work; sometimes the honest answer is a mineral paint in a period color.
- New blocks are fine, in the right place. For a new patio screen in the spirit of the house, new production blocks in a documented period pattern beat a fake vintage substitute every time. Save the guilt for the walls that actually date to 1960.
Breeze Blocks: Frequently Asked Questions
What are breeze blocks?
Breeze blocks are decorative concrete blocks with a pattern cast through them, stacked into screen walls. They block sun, glare, and sightlines while letting air pass, and they were a signature material of mid century modern architecture from about 1950 to 1970, especially in hot climates.
Why are they called breeze blocks?
The name describes the job: unlike a solid wall, a pierced screen wall lets the breeze through. In the years before affordable air conditioning, a screen wall could shade a patio or carport and cool the rooms behind it while keeping the space open and ventilated.
Who invented breeze blocks?
No single person did. Pierced screens are centuries old in hot climates, modernists developed the concrete brise soleil in the 1930s and 1940s, and Edward Durell Stone popularized the pierced concrete grille in America in the mid 1950s. American block plants then turned the idea into cheap, stackable eight inch units for tract housing.
What is the most common breeze block pattern?
The square in square, sold under names including Vista Vue, is the most widespread pattern in the United States. Other classics are the X or cross, the quatrefoil, the diamond, and the circle in square. Many original walls mix two patterns.
Are breeze blocks making a comeback?
Yes. As mid century houses became collectible, manufacturers in Florida and the Southwest returned classic patterns to production, and salvaged original blocks trade steadily. New blocks are widely used for patio screens, garden walls, and interior dividers in both restored and new houses.
How can I tell if a breeze block wall is original to my house?
Look for patterns that appear in period regional block catalogs, mortar and weathering consistent with the house's age, and walls that align with the original plan, at carports, entry courts, and patios. Local historic preservation offices and neighborhood surveys in tract districts often document the original patterns house by house.
A breeze block wall is the rare building part that is structure, shade, fence, and signature in one stack of concrete. If your house has one, it is not a quirk to apologize for. It is the date stamp, in the best way. Next in this series: the mid century living room, credenzas, slat walls, and the art of the low line.
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Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you shop through them, I may earn a commission from eBay at no extra cost to you.