Considerations of the Gold Coast's architectural heritage tend to privilege the signification of those building materials widely used during the city's post-war boom. This paper reflects on the breeze block as a material that opens debate on the relation of the city's image to its reality and its past. It offers a reflection on a moment of suburban expansion in which the tenets of high modernism were distilled into the architectural language of mid-century Australia. Despite its history as a low-cost material used primarily in the construction of loadbearing walls, the industrialised production of imitative rockface and decorative breeze blocks in the twentieth century marked an important shift in its role in American (and then an Austerican) domestic architecture. With the block's recalibration from structure to decoration, substance to skin, and with its widespread suburban uptake, the material engages with the longstanding role assigned the Gold Coast (from Robin Boyd onwards) as an accentuated moment among Australian cities and for Australian architecture. Common practices and manoeuvres therein find an extreme expression now informing disproportionate claims upon the specificity of their cultural significance. Offering a brief description of the breeze block's twentieth century turn to the pattern screen, this paper opens out on to instances where the image of the breezeblock within contemporary Australian art concerned with the Gold Coast (directly or otherwise) has served to emphasise this notion of breeze block as surface. In doing so, this paper positions research into the Gold Coast breeze block in light of 'official' efforts to align such other materials as fibro-cement with the city's collective memory (Fibro Coast, Arts Centre Gold Coast and Gold Coast Heritage, 2013-14) thereby fostering an institutionalised nostalgia - anchored to a fixed image of the city's architectural and urban history - that the breezeblock serves here to undermine.