How Did One Man Save 300,000 Tiles of Barcelona Architecture? The Tile Hunter
Video from Into the wild houses
How Did One Man Save 300,000 Tiles of Barcelona Architecture? The Tile Hunter
"The Tile Hunter, Barcelona
Every day, somewhere in Barcelona, a 100 year old floor goes into a trash.
Joel Cánovas tries to get there first. On a bike, with a backpack, he has rescued more than 300,000 hydraulic cement tiles from renovation sites, cleaned them, catalogued them, and found them new homes, from Barcelona to Los Angeles and Australia.
In this film we follow one rescue from the message to the warehouse, walk through what may be the largest collection of hydraulic tile patterns in the world, about 5,000 of them, and watch a tile being made the way it was made a century ago: pigment, marble dust and cement, poured into a brass mould, pressed at 15 tonnes, and left to dry for 28 days.
More films about houses, makers and materials:
WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH THE TILE HUNTER?
Contact us through our website or find him at instagram.com/i_rescue_tiles
CHAPTERS
0:00 I rescue tiles
1:11 The warehouse, an old bottle factory
2:03 A message: tiles in a skip
2:33 One rescue, a bike and a backpack
5:11 5,000 patterns, one collection
6:09 Making a tile the old way
10:54 The rare ones: blue, birds, a face
12:13 They are not ours
Hydraulic tiles, mosaico hidráulico in Spanish, rajola hidràulica in Catalan, are not fired. They are cement, marble dust and pigment pressed in a mould and cured, and they covered the floors of Barcelona from the 1880s to the 1950s. Each pattern belongs to a factory, a time and a place." from the video introduction
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