Brief of the exercise:

The exercise was to design a famous Panot hexagonal cement floor tile as designed by Gaudi in 1904.One of the particularity of this design was supposed to be the capacity to be inserted within a larger assembly and to create continuous patterns across several tiles.

Concept:

When it comes to the notion of continuity within an assembly of tiles repetitive look of the whole flooring sometimes becomes mundane, so to break this repetitive laying was the major concern along with the channeling of water on a surface which should be controlled by the level difference within the pattern. And even in water channel the intent was to achieve the water flow which gives the sense of surprise in the journey.

We started with the idea of illusion. We thought of creating an effect of crack. This gives us random look in the overall flooring even though the tiles are of the same pattern. We wanted to surprise the user while walking on this tile, thus by illusion of crack and randomness in the flooring we can always make user to look at the pattern.

 Execution:

To achieve the end result we used 3d software to simulate the pattern. We used the plugin where particles are collided to the surface and it gives various patterns. This collision can be controlled as per the expected end result.

Then we used rhino cam(plugin for rhino) where we defined the strategies for the milling process of the mold. We used two ball mills, 12mm for pen for the carving of the mold and 3mm pen for the final finishing and engraving. Once the molds were ready we applied four layers of sealant at interval of 15 minutes to dry and then wax before pouring concrete into the mold. Each time took 12 hours to dry.

After getting all the tile we cleaned it with hot water to get rid of extra wax and then it was ready to lay cracks all over the place.

The thought was to overcome the limitations of the milling machine and the concrete hence present a tile that would appear to be visually soft and contrast to both the nature of the material and the machine.

To achieve our goal we focused on two main aspects the first being the use of shadows to make the material more vivid and the second designing to maintain the values which we are able to mill using the machine.

Hence the idea of forming a regular pattern was ruled out and the approach was to simulate the nature of the woolen fiber. 

In order to achieve the desired simulation an image of the wool was inserted into Rhino, Grasshopper and Photoshop. Various permutations and combinations were done to provide the dramatic effect we wanted to create.

We then used this as the basis for our design in Rhinocam where various strategies (curve machining, parallel finishing) were tried.

In order to take take advantage of the milling machine only points at different levels were given the shape formed as a resulted generated purely by the machine itself.  The final strategy with the tool of ball mill 12 used were horizontal roughening, hole pocketing and engraving.

The mold was then cleaned made non porous using epoxy. Vaseline was then added in order to prevent the concrete from sticking to the mold. The mold was then again experimented on with by trying to changing it’s the nature using the Vaseline.