Antoni Gaudí

ANTONÍ GAUDÍ (Reus or Riudoms, Tarragona, 1852 – Barcelona, 1926).
Hydraulic floor tile. Designed by Gaudí for Escofet. Casa Batlló. Casa Milà and La Pedrera. Designed in 1904.
Second mold, edition produced by Escofet Barcelona in the 1970s (stamped on the reverse).
Seven tiles identical to this one are on display in the Design and Architecture section of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Escofet certificate included.
Measurements: 25 x 25 x 2.2 cm.

This tile, produced by Escofet—a company founded in 1886—was designed by Antoni Gaudí in 1904 as interior flooring for Casa Batlló, where the concepts of the sea and water served as his source of inspiration. However, due to a delay in production, it could not be installed there, and Gaudí chose to use it in his next major work, La Pedrera. Its hexagonal shape creates a continuous, uniform floor without visible lines, as the seam between each tile is hidden and the texture of its relief is highlighted by the light. This unique geometry, a departure from conventional square shapes, allowed Gaudí to pave the spaces of his buildings with sinuous contours. It was Gaudí himself who sculpted the design of the tile in wax, thereby demonstrating his skill in the field of sculpture. The relief pattern makes perfect sense when seven tiles are joined together, revealing three marine elements: a conch, a starfish, and a seaweed. In the case of the conch, it is a cephalopod fossil of the ammonite class. The starfish is a non-exact representation of an echinoderm from the class Ophiroidea, resembling a starfish, although starfish have five arms and this one has six. The seaweed is a thallophyte of the genus Sargassum. The six-sided profiles are reminiscent of the cells in a honeycomb or the pattern on a turtle’s shell. The design, faithful to the original, features the figures in bas-relief—the starfish, the seashell, and the seaweed—which evoke the sinuousness of oceanic movement. Seven tiles identical to this one are on display in the Design and Architecture section of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, as the first product considered to be industrial design and because of the revolution it sparked among the models of its time—which, in contrast, were designed using a wide variety of pieces to create similar floor patterns. Through his design, Gaudí thus solved a complex, large-scale production process with a single piece. The tile is also on display at the Barcelona Design Museum and the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).