{"id":50476,"date":"2018-09-05T10:35:07","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T17:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=50476"},"modified":"2024-04-17T06:34:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T13:34:02","slug":"design-trend-report-terrazzo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/design-trend-report-terrazzo","title":{"rendered":"Design Trend Report: Terrazzo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terrazzo may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of a design trend<\/a>, but not so fast. After all, this popular flooring and wall treatment, a composite material that’s either precast or poured into place, is made up of pieces of marble, quartz, granite, or glass. These individual components are then poured with a so-called binder, whether polymeric, cement-based or a combination thereof. That’s how you get Terrazzo<\/em>.\nHowever, it’s the intricate and interesting patterns that result from this happy mixture that has established Terrazzo as a design style<\/a> that delivers quite the aesthetic punch. That’s to say nothing of the stunning colors that are also possible with this material! It’s no wonder, then, that this material has influenced numerous graphic-design creations, websites, and even inspired various social-media hashtags and Twitter chats.\nAs you’ll soon find out, Terrazzo<\/strong> is a lot more than just a flooring material. It’s a design aesthetic that goes back thousands of years, while still retaining its unique influence today in the 21st<\/sup> century.\n

<\/span>The History of Terrazzo (and Terrazzo Design)<\/span><\/h2>

\nYou may be surprised to learn that this material was first used as early as 9000 to 8000 BC, according to archaeologists, who use the word “Terrazzo†to denote the floors of early-Neolithic structures. The Neolithic<\/a> is a reference to a period of mankind’s development, particularly in technology, starting at approximately 10,200 BC and lasting until about 4500 to 2000 BC.\nOne Neolithic settlement especially is famous for its Terrazzo floors. Archaeologists have found such features in Cayonu<\/a>, in eastern Turkey: almost 1000 square feet of Terrazzo have been unearthed there.\nTo say that this design style has quite the history behind it is quite an understatement.\n

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Image Source: The Guardian (DEA\/G Nimatallah\/De Agostini\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nFrom its Neolithic beginnings, the material next won favor in the ancient world. The civilizations that gave us Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the infamous treasures of King Tutankhamun also gave us…Terrazzo! According to research by the Library of Congress, today’s Terrazzo floors are the direct descendants of the ancient world’s—specifically Rome, Greece, and Egypt—practice of designing and building mosaic floors<\/a>.\nThis makes sense when you think about it for a moment: when’s the last time that you looked at even just a section of Terrazzo and didn’t think to yourself how palatial and majestic it seemed — almost as if it would fit in perfectly in an ancient temple or mausoleum?\nNext, we fast-forward a few thousand years.\nIf we want to put our finger on the direct reason for the material’s enduring popularity, we have to look to the Italian province of Fruili and its 18th<\/sup>-century mosaic designers. Some 60 miles north of Venice, Fruili was a mass producer of Venetian pavement, called pavimento alla veneziana<\/em>. Fruili’s artists were known as the terrazieri<\/em> (those who work with Terrazzo), which also gives us the modern name for this material. Back in the day, it was commonly used in Venetian structures like churches, where these workers would position fragments of marble beside each other within a mortar base.\nThere’s also a related technique named seminato<\/em>. This involved the same workers throwing bigger marble pieces into cement, which was first ground, then polished.\nIn combination, both of these techniques gave rise to today’s common form of Terrazzo, where fragments of stone are bonded, through a special process, to a cement foundation.\nNow, let’s look at how this material fared when it journeyed across the Atlantic. Terrazzo came to the U.S. not too long ago, in the late 1890s to be precise, and it achieved popularity by the 1920s. In these early days of the 20th<\/sup> century—when design trends like Art Deco<\/a> were in style—it was still quite brittle to work with. As a result, laborers and designers had to utilize it in only small-scale endeavors. There were certainly no ambitious, large-scale flooring projects they could deal with.\nThat all changed suddenly with two inventions: the electric grinding machine and divider strips. The latter enabled those working with the material to finally restrict the continuous crumbling of Terrazzo by allowing the material extra room to both expand and then shrink after it had been installed. We can thank divider strips for allowing artists to create all the impressive designs we see in this substance today because it allowed them to style Terrazzo further, once it was settled in the floor. The electric grinding machine sped up the production process, letting builders and designers cut down on costs.\n
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Image Source: Decopix<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nInterestingly, designers working in the aforementioned Art Deco style—along with its offshoot design trends like Streamline Moderne—used Terrazzo to further Art Deco’s already glitzy and memorable reputation. The divider strips, when used with the material in flooring, let artists include straight or curved lines within terrazzo, thereby adding to its stylistic value. Certainly, when we look at some of Art Deco’s famous characteristics—like its geometric forms, which feature plenty of straight and curved lines in various designs—it’s easy to see how the addition of straight and curved lines in terrazzo would’ve complemented the overall design aesthetic.\n<\/p>

<\/span>The Characteristics of Terrazzo Design<\/span><\/h2>

\nWhether Terrazzo appears in the floor or as part of a graphic-design creation, this substance’s freewheeling creation process gives way to numerous possibilities and styles. As a result, we get to enjoy a lot of diversity in Terrazzo pieces, but, at the end of the day, they all share, in one way or another, the following qualities:\n<\/p>