Tiles of the City

The area around The Center for Applied Liberal Arts’ headquarters  ( specifically Union Square, Chelsea, and Gramercy) is known as the Tile District of NYC and home to dozens of tile showrooms, both retail and for the trade only. From subway stations to glamorous interiors, there are many examples of masterfully crafted tilework in New York City (for example, Rafael Guastavino’s tiled vaults in Grand Central Station and St John the Divine).  As Interior Designer and NYU SPS instructor Susan Slotkis points out in her blog, there are different types of tilework to look out for :

Tiles: made of any number of materials, such as stone (e.g. marble and granite), ceramic, porcelain, or   glass, are usually rectilinear in shape, and cut into standard sizes. (Resilient and soft tiles, not the subject of this article, may include leather, vinyl, rubber, linoleum, carpet, etc.)

Mosaic: smaller units of tiles are often hand-set like a jigsaw puzzle, or more uniformly machine-cut and arranged in sheets. 

Picassiette: loosely translated from French meaning stolen pottery, is a decorative application of tiling of usually shards of porcelain often to small projects such as frames and to layer furniture but also to larger projects, e.g. Gaudi’s Guell Park, Barcelona.