CERAMIC TILES

on the facades of common architecture in the historical center of Porto

case study

Ivana Korac
2007.

Index

1. Introduction
2
2. Historical frame
3
3. Techniques and patterns
6
4. Pathology and main anomalies of tiles
10

5. Techniques of conservation and restoration

12
6. Bibliography
14
1. Introduction

One of the characteristics and most interesting phenomena of typical Portuguese

architecture are the facades covered with ceramic tiles. Humid climate conditions in
Portugal and the isolation characteristics of this material make the reasons for their use
rational and obvious, but what is so impressive about this instance is the diversity of their
design and their function of a panel for some magnificent artistic works. Although it is not
originally Portuguese invention, it is deeply integrated into its culture and represents one of
the most impressive features of Portuguese urban landscape. Different types of tiles, found
on the facades of Portuguese civil architecture, glazed monochrome, colorfully patterned or
even relieved, give to each structural piece a carefully sampled and architecturally
integrated surface finishing, while acting as a recognizable element that gives one building
its own identity. Aligned in different ways, creating a dynamic mosaic of colorful street fronts
that form the image of a city's historical center, buildings covered with ceramic tiles have
made a lively contribution to Portuguese design trends throughout the centuries.
Most interesting examples of the ceramic tiles art are the ones decorating the walls of
many churches, palaces or other public buildings, picturesquely describing different
historical moments or carrying religious or ethnic motifs. However, ceramic tiles covering

the facades of a plain civil architecture, need the attention as well, as they are, in a sense of
protection, being more neglected than the other monumental examples.
2. Historical frame
2.1 15th to 19th century

The first known examples of the ceramic tiles wall-covering in Portugal were HispanoMoorish tiles, imported from Seville around 1503. The Arab presence in the Iberian Peninsula
left some lasting cultural trails, one of them being the practice of tile making. At that time
Seville was the big center of the tile industry which used the "cuarda seca" and "cuenca"
techniques until the mid 16th century. The motifs of geometric Moorish lace-like and looping
designs have evolved into European plants and animals themes which gradually progressed
from the Gothic to the pure Renaissance style. Apart from the motifs themselves, Portugal
retained a Moorish taste for excess in the practice of completely covering surfaces with
decorations.
In the 16th century, the development of the ceramic art in Italy led to the use of majolica
technique painting directly onto the tiles. That way, the compositions were expanded
including a variety of figurative themes, historical stories, and decorations. Italian ceramists
then moved to the Flanders region where they disseminated mannerist decorative motifs
and the themes of the antique classicism. After Portuguese orders have been placed in
Flanders, some Flemish ceramists moved to Lisbon and initiated the tile production in
Portugal from the second half of the 16th century onwards.
The high cost of large and unique compositions on the wall coverings have made the
repetitive patterns more commonly used and by end of the 16th and the beginning of the
17th century chequered designs became very popular. They were composed of plain colored
tiles, alternated in the way that creates decorative patterns on the walls when combined.
This time, because of the cost of the appliance on the wall, these types of tiles were
substituted with the standard patterned ones, produced in large quantities and easily
applied .
In the second quarter of the 18th century, the increase of the Portuguese tile manufacture
happened partly due to many orders from Brazil. This period called The Great Production,
overlapped with the reign of King Dom Joo V and the creation of the largest cycles of
historical panels ever made in Portugal. This kind of production led to the repetition of the

same motifs like vases with flowers and the simplification of the painting of the scenes
themselves, while the great scenographic importance was given to the surrounding frames.
2.2 19th and 20th century

In the 19th century, new techniques were revealed to the factories, exited from the
industrial revolution, which made consequent the production of series that favored the
return of the patterned tiles. In the second half of the 19th century, inside the eclectic selftolerance of Romanism, a painted type of tiles appeared, more related to the individual
compositions. Those decorative panels of figurative and ornamental character, made for a
specific facade, were often applied to some new utilities, mostly the commercial
establishments. Some factories have specialized in the production of this type, like
Sacavm, Viva Lamego, Campolide e SantAnna (in Lisbon), Carvalhinho (in Porto) and
Fonte Nova and Aleluia (in Aveiro).
The taste for the tiles at the facades of a civil architecture was developed in Portugal,
from the middle 19th century, by the Portuguese emigrants who had returned to the country
after making a fortune in Brazil. They had revealed the utilization of the tiles as a facade
clothing following a current tradition in Brazil from the past century. The tiles were taken to
these countries by the Portuguese, serving as a ship balance ballast, which had affected the
commercial trades during the 17th and 18th centuries. Parts of this ballast were decorative
panels for churches and palaces and parts were just plain white tiles for common uses. The
application of white tiles on the exteriors of churches and houses became common in the
18th century, as, in this way, they preserved the constructions from the hot and humid
climate, characteristic in the tropical zones of Brazil.
The facade clothing with ceramic tiles protects the houses from the erosion provoked by
the strong rains and reduces the interior temperature. It is a material with the isolating
characteristics, cheap, of great durability and easy to conserve. Functional use of the tiles is
complemented by its decorative role as the animator of the facade surfaces while giving
simultaneously the color and the purity to the building.
In Portugal, padding of blank spaces on the facades with ceramic tiles had first happened
in the area of Porto and Gaia, the center of the bourgeois development and the field of
attraction for the emigrants who came back to the region of their origins. After it had passed
to the provinces of Minho and Douro and very quickly to the whole country, they ended by
being completely accepted by the Portuguese society.

Different artistic values of the tiles decoration, characteristic of the Romantic culture, have
remained until the beginning of the 20th century, parallel to what had happened to the
spheres of painting and sculpture, where the Naturalism aesthetic had started to dominate.
Using the traditional technique of the brush painting on the tinned glass surfaces, some
authors had freely recreated or imitated the styles from the past. Historic and nationalistic
tile art, with folklore or religious character, emphasized distinct themes, like monuments,
landscapes, ethnographic motives, scenes and typical figures of any region or some marked
episodes from the Portuguese history. Many train stations and markets were decorated with
the panels of this artistic tendency. The So Bento train station in Porto is one of the
representatives.

Walls of the So Bento train station

The 20s and the 30s of the 20th century were marked by the geometrical and more clear
motives and forms, replying to the changes of taste that resulted from the Great War.
Geometrical compositions of the Art Deco patterns presented a character more rational and
clarified with the characteristic design. From the beginning of the 40s, the architecture of
the New Age (implanted as a direct consequence of the Portuguese World Exposition in
1940) had eliminated the decorative use of the tiles in architecture. Considered to be the
Minor art, the tiles were substituted with some new finishing materials, like marble or
glass and hydraulic mosaics. From that point on, various artists had realized their work of
recuperation and renovation of the old tiles, with the aim of integrating this part of
Portuguese tradition into the modern art.

3. Techniques and patterns

A tile is a ceramic piece of plain faience composed of one plate (generally square, but
can be rectangular also), made of cooked clay and glazed on the illustrious side, which
serves as a surface that supports the color and design.
A tile used as a covering material for the buildings exteriors is basically a tile with
patterns of traditional wallpaper from the 17th century. Frequently it is a rectangular tile,
monochrome and faceted.
Facade tile covering is based on the regular repetition of one or more tiles in order to
form patterns. One unique tile can content its own complete pattern, permitting itself an
independent character in relation to the rest. However, the major of patterns are composed
of the modules of 4 equal elements, following the formula 2x2/1. Rarely the patterns are
formed of 2 or more equal tiles. In most cases the tiles cover the whole surface, inserting
itself clearly in the architectonic organization of the facade. The color and the design (that is
better seen from the distance) enrich and characterize the building.
The design can be done in a natural way which doesnt affect the visual function of the
facade, giving it more or less intense pigmentation, a colored mark visible from afar. In other
cases, diluting a design of a detail with a distance, the lines of the force stand on the
surface. That way, the rhythm of decorative motives neutralizes the static character of the
facades, giving it its own dynamics by the lines of the perpendicular or diagonal tension.
Also, resulting in an assembly of tiles, the reticles form a quadrille grid, dimensioning the
surface.
The expressiveness of some patterns can transform the expression of the building itself in
order to cross the verticality of construction, the pattern with the horizontal sense would be
applied, and vice versa.
The tiles with a pattern are most favorable for the serial production, either half-industrial,
by the processes of manual repetition (stamping or manual stamping and the high-relief), or
industrialized (mechanically stamped and half-relief tiles).

HALF-INDUSTRIALIZED STAMPED TILES

The factories that produced this type of tiles
have adopted a standard format (13x13 or 14x14
cm). The painting was manually done with a
broad brush the paint would be put on the tile, over
the pattern-cut wax paper which would leave a
pattern - stamp on a tile already clothed in
enameled tin. Frequently one was able to see on
such a tile the traces of brush hair as well as the
light spreading of the pigment/tint near its limits,
which would help to distinguish this process of
decoration. During the second half of the 19th
century, the variety of "commercialized" stamped
tiles was great, although they were only a simple
compositions in blue and white color or with some
polychromatic
schemes.
In
the
cases
of
monochrome decoration only one stamp was used;
for the decoration with various colors, one stamp
would correspond to only one color. Some patterns
had the manual finishing, like brush strokes,
contours and other painting marks made with a fine
brush, which appears usually in the older
examples.

Decorative motifs go from the geometrical

compositions to the floral elements or the designs
inspired by the antique patterns. On the 18th
century designs the patterns are clearly influenced
by the design that comes from abroad (from
England, France, and Netherlands), either directly
by the grasp of the catalogs or the import of the
molds, either indirectly by the divulgation of
designs on the textiles or wallpapers in the fashion
of that time. The copies of a foreign model
contributed to the impoverishment of the
Portuguese character of the ornamental motifs.
One of the biggest factories that produced tiles in
this poque was Fbrica das Devezas.

The patterns of the factories from Porto are

different from the patterns of the Lisbon factories.
The former give advantage to the geometrical
elements in more complex and refined way, with
domination of dark colours like black, brown, violet,
and the colour of wine, while in Lisbon, the tiles
were characterised by a simpler design, with
vegetal or floral stylization or geometric motifs,
clearly defined contours and live colours like strong
blue, yellow and green.

stamped pattern in yellow and blue over

the white background

high-relieved tiles rosette

yellow on the white background

coloured in

stamped pattern in blue tones over the

white background

half-relieved tile floral decoration coloured in

blue over the white background

geometrical pattern stamped in two tones of

brown on the white background

beveled tiles in red colour

Relieved tiles - While in Lisbon the bigger scale of stamped patterns was printed, in
Porto the relieved tiles were popularized, which characterized the tile production in this city,
reflecting the influence of the molding ceramics realized there in the 18th century. Forming a
surface of a cast dimension, they have created effects of the light and brightness over the
paint and the design, giving the volumetric suggestions to the facades. In order to
maximally accent these light effects, the relieved tiles presented different colors for the
motifs and for the basic layout. The tile surface,
intentionally enameled in white, was painted in a
very coarse way with the opaque blue, yellow or
green color. This painting was determined only by
the colored volumes or smooth background,
without any kind of pictorial effects.

High-relieved tiles production was realized by

mold filled with clay which would be manually
made by fingers pressing. The most salient relief
zones were pointed by excavating the clay from the
tile, but avoiding possible deformations during
baking. The marigold (also called the rosette) or
other floral forms, salient from the background,
have turned into the dominant decorative motifs.
The half-relieved tiles were not made conformably,
but mechanically pressing the tile with a mold and
a contra mold, resulting with finer plates.

pressed tiles with floral motifs

Half-relieved tiles - were produced by the

factories Sacavm and Desterro, using a new white
paste, commonly used in the manufacturing of
English dishes, known as the "stone powder". This
paste, white and opaque, ensued from steel less
clay and mixed with grind quartz. The tiles appear
to be covered with glass, colored in only one color
(white, green, blue, yellow and brown) or not
colored at all. They have spread along at the firs
two decades of the century presenting some Art
Nouveau motifs.
pressed tiles

Beveled tiles were made in a rectangular form

with beveled edges. They were glazed and
produced in dark green, light and dark blue, yellow,
cream/white, dark red and in some other tones of
green and blue color.
MECHANICALLY STAMPED/PRINTED TILES
Before the end of the 20th century, the
stamping
gave
place
to
the
mechanical
stamping/printing, relieved from the recent
industrial revolution, evident at the economics of
materials and the chromatic palette and now

9
Art Deco tiles

reduced to only one color variant in tones. The decoration was applied by a stamp over a
glazed stanniferous white tile (when the tile is made of plain clay). The chosen design was
primarily pressed on the paper by a zinc plate and then on a tile for half of one press. At the
end, a glassy transparent layer was applied to it.

They are easily distinguished by monochrome stamp,

in neutral or spiritless colors (blue, green, brown,
yellow or pink are most frequent ones), on top of a
white or beige chock.

Printed tiles used foreign design models, imported

from England, France, Germany, and Belgium, with the
creations of new patterns which provoked spectacular
growth of production. Nevertheless, the same pattern
can have variances in color or design, which can be
explained by the fact that different factories produced
tiles with identical patterns, probably imported from
abroad, or have had access to the same catalogs, or
have simply copied them one from another.

Art Deco, the rational and purified style influenced the

tile production in Portugal in the 20s and 30s of the
20th century. The tiles of that period were
characterized by the technical quality, formal
expression, and industrialized concept, while the forms
were mostly geometrical with no volumetric effects
and the design reduced to the graphic elements of
rational construction. The compositions would result
with the geometrically combined tiles in smooth colors.
4. Pathology and main anomalies of tiles

original defect bad fabrication

deficient setting

10

effects provoked by structural movements

The pathology and anomalies that can be

found on the tile covering are many times
directly provoked by the bad state of
conservation of the building they belong to.
It is necessary to observe and analyze the
general state of conservation of the
immobilities in order to give clear
diagnostics and prescribe the therapies
necessary for the conservation and eventual
restoration of the tile panels.
Principal
anomalies
because of:

basically

disappearance of glaze

appear

- The original defects as a result of bad

fabrication of the tile, use of low-quality
clay, deficient baking, etc.
- The deficient setting of tiles on the panels composition with errors, badly executed
spacing, props under pressure, etc.
- The effects provoked by structural
movements rotation of foundations, for an
example, can provoke some mechanical
actions which can change the geometry of
the supporting walls.
- Humidity actions coming from the wall
itself or as a result of condensation.

loosening of the supporting layer

crack on the tile

11
change of colours

Mechanisms of degradation of tiles and their causes:

Disappearance of glaze caused by the presence of salt, lichens and human action of
improper cleaning
- Loosening of the supporting layer caused by the loss of mortar cohesion,
introduction of plants or roots on the inside face of the stone, water infiltration or
human action of removing tiles because of the ignorance, steal, selling or collections.
- Cracks and breaks caused by variations in geometry of the structure, inadequate
restorations, bad factoring processes, effects from frozen water or direct human
action such as vandalism of any kind,
- Change of colors caused by graffitis or diffusion of conjunctive tints.
5. Techniques of conservation and restoration
-

The respect for the ethic principles of conservation (given in the Venice chart from 1964.)
should be guaranteed in any case and it nominally refers to:
- The demand for the authenticity - historic, aesthetic, constructive and technologic.
- The demand for the durability materials and techniques that question the long durability
of old buildings should not be used.
- The demand for compatibility the use of new techniques and materials can be
indispensable for its conservation, so there must be guaranteed conditions for their
reversibility and compatibility with the old building materials.
- The demand for economy the extreme economic conditioning in the operation of
conservation can aggravate the problem or delay its resolution.

12

In practice, these principles are not always easy to apply because it is an action that needs
to be pre-discussed between representatives of many other disciplines. However, there are
some simplified options for the intervention of restoration.
1. substitution of unrecoverable tiles with new ones, done using the old technique by
acknowledged artisans or specialists
2. minimal intervention of replenishment of existing faults with the adequate mortar, which
highlights "in negative" the missing parts. The problem occurs when the number of missing
tiles is very high or even prevailing the number of existing ones. In that case, the reading of
the composition of the panel would be difficult to disclose.
3. interventions of reintegration the total or partial replacement of the missing tiles with
new pieces, which enables the reading of the composition from afar, but observed in detail,
can always give the notion that it is, in fact, the intervention.
The examples of inappropriate interventions

padding of the spaces with missing original

padding of the space with missing
original
tiles with similarly designed tiles
tiles with coloured mortar
Before initiating any cleaning operation, conservation and/or restoration it is obligatory to
proceed with following actions:
- Making of the complete photo register of the whole panel with tiles;
- Marking the tiles with referent codes that define their position on the panel.
Conservation and restoration "in situ" "on the spot" is more defended for the fact that,
once when is proceeded with the taking off the tiles from the wall, many of them end up
broken. However, there are the cases when their treatment is needed to be done in an
atelier or a specialized laboratory. Treatment and restoration "in situ" "on the spot" involve
the following operations:
-

13

Surface cleaning
Desalination and removal of the lichens and encrusted plants

Punctual consolidation by injection of chemical products

Cleaning of the mortar on the inside face of single tiles
Gluing for an example the glaze to the plate
Padding of the faults (with plaster or synthetic clay)
Painting of the faults in order to restore the legibility of the original composition

The treatment and the restoration of the tiles outside the original support
When the restoration of the tiles must be done outside of the original support, it has to be
only if absolutely necessary, because the quantity of tiles that break or get damaged in the
process of taking off is about 20%. So the lifting of tiles is generally done when:
- is indispensable to treat the supporting structure
- the mortar is very old and degraded and needs to be replaced
- their state of conservation is so degraded that it can be resolved only in the laboratory
- it is the last solution to guarantee their preservation (in the case if eminent demolition of
the building, for an example)
Treatment of the supported structures and wall surfaces generally involve:
- the mechanical lifting of the tiles
- complete removal of the old mortar
- general application of a biocide
- structural consolidation of the wall and most fragile zones
application of a wall plaster, remaking the geometry of the wall and preparing it for the
installation of already treated tiles
Treatment and cleaning of the tiles:
-

cleaning
cleaning
cleaning
cleaning

the
the
the
the

skin-deep dirt
outdated glue
concretions
vegetation and removing the organic elements

Consolidation - general or punctual

Setting up the tiles on the support:
After the treatment of the support and the application of the biocides (if necessary) the tile
has to be set up with a mortar based on air extinguished lime and sand. The finishing of the
joints between tiles is done with a whitewash of the same consistency coated over the tiles.
When it dries, the panel is cleaned with a cloth by removing the half opaque layer of the
glaze. This system guarantees adequate junctions porosity of the water vapor and avoidance
of damage caused by the water accumulation.

Bibliography

14

AGUIAR, Jos, Recuperao de azulejos, Construo Civil e Obras Publicas, Restauro e

Reabilitao de edifcios, Guia do Formando
AMORIM, Sandra Arajo, Azulejaria de Fachada na Pvoa de Varzim (1850-1950), Portugal,
Edio de Autor, 1996.
COSTA, Anbal,; GUEDES, Joo M.; SILVA, Paula; PAUPRIO, Esmeralda, A Interveno no
Patrimnio Prticas de Conservao e Reabilitao, Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia da
Universidade do Porto Direco Geral dos Edifcios e Monumentos Nacionais, 2002.
LEMMEN, Hans Van, Tiles in Architecture, Inglaterra, Calmann & King Lda., 1993.
MECO, Jos, O Azulejo em Portugal, Lisboa, Publicaes Alfa, S.A., 1993.
MONTEIRO, Joo Pedro, O Azulejo no Porto, Portugal, Estar Editora, 2001.
VELOSO, A. J. Barros; ALMASQU, Isabel, Azulejaria de Exterior em Portugal, Portugal,
Edies Inapa, 1991.

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