(View original article at the Coverings Blog)
Ceramic
tile has been a popular building material for over 4,000 years. It
played a prominent role in the history of building construction from the
oldest pyramids in Egypt to the tile mosaics of Spain. We have seen
century old buildings inlaid with it, proving its longevity and
strength.
Gruell Parc Trencadis by Antonio Gaudi (image by lloydi.com)
Catalan modernist architect Antonio Gaudi
leveraged tile in an unconventional method in the Güell Parc project
where Trencadis was ubiquitous. Trencadis (or Pique Assiette) is a mosaic technique that utilizes broken tile chards, which could possibly address some LEED credits such as Innovation in Design, Material Reuse, Recycled Content and in the case of the Güell Parc, Regional Materials,
since Gaudi used discarded pieces of ceramic tiles, as well as white
ceramic from broken cups and plates collected from manufacturers’
factories within its region of Esplugues de Llobregat, Spain.
As
for stone, when architects and designers specify it for surface
finishing, the design decisions are influenced by visual considerations
derived from the stone’s patterns. The manufacturer cuts a block of
stone driven by these aesthetic parameters which can be anywhere within
the block. The scrap stone is then discarded and often diverted to
landfill. Wojtek Rajch, president of Earth Stone Midwest
in Chicago, wants to change that through his re-manufacturing company.
They use marble and granite scrap cut-stone collected from shops within
its locality as the “raw material” for their products. The company
re-cuts and re-finishes scrap cut-stone into new shapes and sizes, for
use as flooring, pavers, wall coverings, and architectural build-outs.
While Antonio Gaudi recycled ceramic from broken cups and plates, architecture firm Canon Design transformed 200,000 pounds of porcelain material from water closets at the iconic John C. Kluczynski Building by Mies van der Rohe,
into clean modern-looking tiles covering 57,000 square feet. This
innovation in design was a result of the relationship between the
architect (Canon Design) and the manufacturer (Crossville, Inc.) within
the framework of the manufacturer’s tile-recycling program called “Tile
Take Back”. Crossville, Inc.
has developed this proprietary system of processing ceramic and
porcelain tile back into powder used in manufacturing new tile. When
architects lead these types of conversations, such as the case of Cannon
Design, and involve themselves in the early planning stages of custom
tile production, then the project likely results in exceptionally
meeting the client’s basis of design and the project’s design
objectives.
“Finding the right product for a project is equally important as finding the right manufacturer to work with on a project.
A designer’s idea is only as good as the products he/she specifies as
well as how the manufacturer executes this idea.” This is clearly
evident in the projects Yoder Residence, Wilkinson Office Warehouse
Reconstruction, McCue Residence, Bradley Residence, and Ellsworth
Residence, by Michael P. Johnson, the first American to win Italy’s prestigious 11th International Aldo Villa Award .
Johnson’s work on the Bradley and Ellsworth residential projects in particular, have earned him the
Italian Trade Commission’s
coveted Legend Award. He will be sharing his insights on best practices
while working on these projects, at Coverings 2013 together with
Lira Luis at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.
Recent
advancements in tile have allowed designers more opportunities for
creativity and pathways to ecological thinking. This is exactly what
architecture firm ALLL in Chicago, led by Lira Luis, is aiming for in its Living Wall System project. In collaboration with Habitile’s Aurora Mahassine,
the Living Wall System project is an attempt to analyse the
environmental, social, and economic dimensions of buildings to reiterate
eco-systemic performance and of the urban ecosystem to provide habitat,
food, and energy within the topographies of developing countries and
reinhabitation of industrialized ones. This could be a model that can be
replicated elsewhere. Luis will be presenting this project, currently
in its earliest stages of development that experiments with tile, for
the first time, at their Coverings presentation.
Meanwhile, Tile of Spain manufacturer, Ceracasa
in collaboration with the Institute of Chemical Technology from Pol.
University of Valencia and the Environmental Studies Centre of the
Mediterranean (CEAM), have produced the Bionic tile. It is a porcelain
tile that can purify air and destroy harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) that
are emitted during the combustion process from vehicular and industrial
pollution.
New technologies continue to disrupt the Tile & Natural Stone
Industry and they are not without skeptics as well as reluctant
adopters. In a recent Twitter communication with Patti Fasan, first woman to receive the prestigious Joe Tarver award of the National Tile Contractors Association,
she posed an important question that architects and designers need to
address as far as the underlying hesitancy to adopt emerging
technologies in a profession that thrives on innovation: How can architecture adopt existing innovation (in Tile & Natural Stone) faster in the USA?
We
must leave no stone and tile unturned when it comes to seeking and
using new materials for the advancement of architecture and design.