Breeze Cross

An open cross-shaped block, repeated in a tight grid. The form comes from mid-century breeze blocks — the pierced concrete screens that shaded carports, motel courtyards, and ranch-house walls across the American Southwest from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Breeze blocks did two jobs at once: they let air and light through, and they turned a plain wall into pattern. The cross is one of the oldest of those block shapes — simple, blunt, structural.

The pattern scales cleanly in either direction. At wall scale it’s a screen you can see through. Cut small in aluminum or brass, the same cross becomes earrings or a pendant — solid where the wall is solid, open where the wall is open.