Found Space Tiles
Found Space Tiles by Stephanie Davidson
As an architect I often ask myself, how can this surface, this wall or floor, give more? What more can it give? In answering this question, I have produced a series of ceramic tile prototypes - tiles that reach out to be touched.Much like appropriating found objects, in my work I use the found spaces between bodies and architectural surfaces, and turn them into positive forms. The design process is incidental; the forms happen, they aren’t sculpted or orchestrated. The resulting tiles are a formal hybrid between two very necessary and basic architectural elements, the body and the wall. Part body and part wall, the tiles echo the presence of a person, a posture, and literally reach-out to touch and be touched.
What these tiles give is a reference to the human body, embedded in a building material. The tiles encourage direct physical interaction; through touching and leaning, bodies find new niches for support, undulating folds and protrusions for resting, stimulating pressure points, or simply fitting like a garment - a new-found intimacy.
In my process of form or space finding, I’ve used fabric formwork to cast or fill the negative gaps between bodies and walls. The finished tiles, after being materially translated into ceramic, freeze a posture, a moment of body-wall contact, as well as the behaviour of fabric - stretching or bulging in response to the pressure of the body and the weight of the plaster. The tiles play with the senses, appearing still soft and responsive.
Made in posture and/or body-specific clusters, the tiles are designed in standard finished dimensions, to be incorporated into standard tiled walls. This series of prototypes has been made to be integrated into a standard and inexpensive 15 x 15cm tile surface.
Research and prototypes for Found Space Tiles were made during a residency for architecture + ceramics at the European Ceramic Work Centre (ekwc) in s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, October 2007 - February 2008. They were exhibited in the designboom mart at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in NY in May 2008, and have been recently added to materia.nl, a well-known web-database of new and innovative architectural materials. Found Space Tiles will be produced by the Dutch ceramics company Corunum and will be available in August 2008.
- Ondine