Yet 150 years ago, Barcelona tiles, also known as encaustic cement or hydraulic tiles, revolutionised floors worldwide. Invented in the Catalan capital in 1857 by the company M. de C. Butsems & Fradera, tiles were made from a new cement compound that didn’t need oven baking. Usually measuring 20-by-20 centimetres, these floor tiles became cheaper and quicker to produce and easier to transport.
Two Barcelona residents, Mario Arturo Hernández Navarro and Bénédicte Bodard are determined to save the Barcelona tile and restore it to its former glory. Mario Arturo, born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico in 1963, researches and digitally preserves tiles in all their kaleidoscopic beauty. He first “fell into” tiles in Puerto Rico in 1990 and picked up the trail in their birthplace, Barcelona, where he has lived since 1997.
He painstakingly traces each one using computer programs Illustrator or Freehand, and has collected the images in a hardback pocket book entitled Barcelona Tiles (www.pepinpress.com). “The little book is proving very popular,” he told Metropolitan. “Everyone knows about Gaudí’s ceramic trencadís but people often say to me, ‘I would never have noticed the floor, until I met you.’”
Bénédicte Bodard is equally dedicated. Born in Rouen in Normandy, France in 1960, Bodard worked as a stylist in Los Angeles before moving to Barcelona with her husband seven years ago. She now runs her own business, Mesa Bonita, recycling antique floor tiles as original artisan tables. “I don’t want people to ask in 10 years, ‘Where did all the tiles go?’”
At the turn of the last century, in the heyday of Modernisme, Barcelona tiles were in great demand. It was a time when floors did not have to match the furniture, said Mario Arturo Hernández. Anything was acceptable, from geometric classical patterns to Celtic-style chains, from stylish curves to flora and fauna explosions. Prevalent colours were brown, burgundy, green, black and, particularly, pink. “In Barcelona they were everywhere. In the Eixample they were the original flooring, in the Gòtic they are early 20th-century reformation jobs, which covered clay or wooden tiles.”
Tiles gave the illusion of being a carpet, and they often had an outer border, which compensated for the irregular shapes of Barcelona rooms. They were particularly impressive in the grand houses of Indianos, the name given to entrepreneurs who made their fortunes in former Spanish colonies and who returned to Catalunya after the 1898 Spanish-American war. At the same time, Barcelona tiles were widely exported to former French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies, as far afield as Cuba and Vietnam, where colours and designs matched the personalities of their adoptive countries.
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