Casa Vincens, Antoni Gaudí
We’re in the midst of partnering with Ceramic of Italy to bring you a design challenge, which is offering $10,000 in design fees and an additional $15,000 prize package to project manage your design!
Now, architects may delegate tiles and other similar design considerations to the margins of architecture, but, having spent some time this past week reading up on the subject, it was actually really interesting to discover the integral role tiles played in the modernization of the 20-century building aesthetic. Here’s an archive of my days of at-first-unwilling-but-then-willing tile-research.
Horta House, Victor Horta
Victor Horta, considered the initiator of Art Nouveau, employed a wealth of new and traditional materials to give form to his house (now the Horta Museum), using industrial methods to create bespoke finishes and surfaces. His tiling of the walls and ceiling would prove quite influential, as evidenced in the work of the Catalan school.
Casa Battlo, Antoni Gaudí
In an attempt to create an independent and original Catalan architectural expression, architects such as Gaudí combined historical forms and geometric motifs with the splines of natural bodies to produce a highly idiosyncratic style–the exuberance of which were actually contingent on rational and innovative structural concepts. Gaudí’s extensive use of colored tile as surface and building material, as he did in his influential 1909 school at the Sagrada Familia, was drawn from the Moorish building tradition.
