"Besides being one of the most visited cities in Europe, Barcelona is famous around the world for its peculiar modernist architecture"
The history of cement tiles
At the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century, a number of Catalan architects, the most famous of whom was Antoni Gaudì, changed the face of Barcelona with their unique buildings.
Cement tiles floors, with their elaborated and imaginative patterns, became a distinctive trait of Barcelona’s modernist architecture.
"Cement tiles became a beautiful, affordable substitute to natural stone"
How cement tiles were made
They were made one by one by cold-pressing together a layer of high quality white Portland cement, marble powder, fine sand and natural mineral colour pigments, onto a base of more coarse cement and sand with a hydraulic press (from here they derive their spanish name “baldosas hidraulicas”). These tiles, exhibited to the Paris International Exhibition of 1867 by the Catalan company Garret & Rivet, were seen as a beautiful, affordable substitute to natural stone like marble.
Reinterpreting the past was one of the core characteristics of modernist art.
"Cement tiles floors, with their elaborate and imaginative patterns, are a distinctive trait of Barcelona’s modernist architecture"
Cement tiles were about making amazing floors with more affordable materials. With these two ideas in mind, we created our first collection of Soft Tiles® Cushions, a contemporary reinterpretation of some of the most beautiful floors from the iconic modernist tradition of Barcelona. A reinterpretation not only making a contemporary use of colour and shapes, but also transferring those incredible patterns onto a different medium: fabric.