Palm Springs has a signature way of breaking up harsh sunlight, and it comes in the form of masonry units with holes. Brise-soleil, French for “sun breaker,” shows up across the Coachella Valley as concrete screen blocks, also called breeze blocks or void blocks, that filter light and heat while casting bold shadows.
One of the best-known examples is at Parker Palm Springs, where a vast south-facing screen uses 2,256 breeze blocks in a 1959 concentric-square pattern known as Vista Vue. Local historian Ron Marshall, who cataloged about 250 archival patterns nationwide with his wife, Barbara, says the placement matters. For true sun-breaking, screens belong on the south side of a building in the Northern Hemisphere, where daily sun exposure hits hardest.
While Palm Springs made screen block famous in the U.S., the idea runs deeper than midcentury modernism. The article traces precedents from South Asia’s jali, lattice walls and windows carved from rock, and Middle Eastern and North African mashrabiya, geometric window screens built from interlocking wood pieces. Brazil’s cobogó, a perforated masonry block developed in Recife in 1929, adapted these strategies to bring in airflow while filtering sunlight.
In the United States, concrete screens gained visibility through influences that ranged from Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1920s textile-block houses in Los Angeles to architect Edward Durell Stone’s U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, completed in 1959, with concrete blocks hand-embedded with marble chips. After screen blocks fell out of favor in the late 1960s, rising temperatures have renewed interest in the low-maintenance performance of fixed masonry screens.
That comeback is also being manufactured locally. Riverside-based Tesselle produces new patterns and vintage reproductions, and the company incorporates rebar reinforcement to meet modern structural standards in seismic Southern California, where the San Andreas Fault runs northwest from the Salton Sea.
Read the full, original article from Palm Springs Life here.