Grown-ups who once decorated their childhood bedroom ceilings with glowing stars but have since developed more sophisticated tastes, take heart: You don’t have to give up the glow-in-the-dark aesthetic completely.
Mixing cement with photo-luminescent stone substrate, Pentagram partner Jody Hudson-Powell created glow-in-the-dark terrazzo tiles for Huguet, a Spanish tile maker—and we want them immediately.
“This mixture enables the tile to glow in dark conditions after being charged by sunlight or artificial light, with the glow lasting about 10 to 12 hours,” Hudson-Powell tells Fast Company.
He started by thinking about the tile as a piece of technology, and how a tile could be “additive and responsive to an environment.” By day, it looks like a traditional terrazzo tile, but after the sun goes down it looks like a green-and-black night sky. The hope, Hudson-Powell says, is that the tiles can bridge night and day and allow someone to move through a dark room without needing to turn on any lights.
Six others at Pentagram created work for Huguet as part of a collaboration released in 2022 that allowed designers at the design firm to explore a new medium, and it gave Huguet a chance to see their craft reinterpreted. An 18-unit tile system by Sascha Lobe can be used as a typeface, and Giorgia Lupi’s tiles were based on Polish composer Frederic Chopin’s 24 preludes. Astrid Stavro designed tiles made from materials like seagrass and recycled cork.
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