With highly visible and award-winning structures like these setting the trend, breeze blocks became a hot architectural ticket. architect Edward Durell Stone’s breeze-block-covered 1959 American embassy in New Delhi, India, caused a sensation.

The cobogó trio’s idea and Wright’s building-block experiments began to gain massive followings when their concepts started hitting the international arena, like when Brazilian architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer put the cobogó front and center for millions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair Brazil Pavilion, and U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright was experimenting with concrete-block construction-which he called “textile blocks”-for his cutting-edge structures, his idea being to create a beautiful and literal building block that people could easily use to construct modular homes. That’s where in the 1920s a group of engineers-Amadeu Oliveira Coimbra, Ernesto August Boeckmann, and Antônio de Góisof-created the “ cobogó” (named after a combination of the first two letters of each of their last names), an architectural element that allows for filtered sunlight and natural ventilation.Įlsewhere in the Americas around that same time, renowned U.S. While versions of screening elements made from wood or masonry have been around for centuries in many cultures, the 20 th-century breeze-block trend kicked off in hot and sunny Brazil. A garden wall shows glimpses of greenery while allowing air circulation.

Mid century breeze blocks