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The tiled façades of Porto

It’s impossilbe to visit Porto and not notice the colourful, ceramic tile-adorned façades of houses there.

Tiled Façade of a house at PortoTiled Façade of a house at Porto

Tiled Façade of a house at PortoTiled Façade of a house at Porto

On our trip this week, I took pictures of many individual tiles:

Colourful tiles of PortoColourful tiles of Porto

While there, I also wrote a program that’d take a tile and create a collage out of it. Most tiles can simply be placed next to each other left-to-right, top-to-bottom to create a stunning pattern:

Tile MontageTile Montage

Tile MontageTile Montage

Others look rather plain or wrong when you do only that. The wife drew my attention to the fact that some tiles were part of a set of four and needed to be mirrored along x and y-axis before being put together. And indeed, doing that reveals patterns that, at least to me, seem imbued with a mystical grandeur:

TileTile

Tile MontageTile Montage

Tile Montage - MirroredTile Montage - Mirrored

Tile MontageTile Montage

Tile Montage - MirroredTile Montage - Mirrored

p.s. Here is the source code of the said program if you’d like to have a go at it yourself.

Date
April 21, 2018
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