A Question of Patterns
This is a picture of a concrete pasta tile. Found all over Mérida, each tile is a basic 20x20cm wafer of concrete with a 1/4 inch layer of color stamped on top to form the pattern. And wow! What amazing patterns there are.
The tile above is one reclaimed from the floors in our front rooms. It has over 900 friends sitting in neat piles at our carpenter’s workshop, cleaned and ready to be relaid. When they return to our house in a week or so, they will migrate upstairs to decorate our bedroom floors.
The joy for us is that since we already own this proud bounty, the choice to reuse them is a no brainer that makes us wonderfully happy. The question now, however, is how to lay them out? Queue the headaches.
There are so many possibilities. Do we lay them square into the room, or in a lozenge (diagonal) pattern? Do we lay them wall to wall, or do we give the whole arrangement a border and have them appear like a rug?
Then, just when you think that’s enough, we realize that our tile can be laid in different arrangements to form completely different patterns. Oh the inhumanity!
Which one do you prefer? This?
Or perhaps this?
Then let’s consider where the pattern starts and stops. This is important because even if you lay the same pattern, the edge changes depending on where you choose to cut things off. Do you like the one above? Or perhaps the one below?
So many choices! When we look one day, we prefer it a certain way. When we look a day later, we change our minds. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Then again, every choice we make says something. So tell us, what do you think?
