The underground cloud-gazer (on pattern-recognition)

My tiny apartment in Singapore is appointed with a fine Italian induction stove and convection oven – gratifying fixtures which deliver a subtle sense of satisfaction when they slide and lock –and five swimming pools, including a 50 m lap pool for immersive length swimming.

These amenities communicate a sense of luxury, but they’re predictable, furnishing an almost a priori sense of what a good and modern and expensive apartment should look and feel like.

And yet one detail did it, like no other – the matched and non-repeating marble tiles in the toilet.

I have fond memories of late childhood, tracing the tile patterns on the floor of my bathroom in my family home. With a resoundingly 1970s suburban motif of mustard yellow and cream, the home builder laid monochromatic yellow and white tiles (3 x 3 cm) into a mosaic covering the floor.

I’d sit and look, in the space of idleness and boredom pre-pocket microcomputer, and look for patters and regularities in the tilework.

YYWWYY

YYYWWYY

WWYYWW

Like some blonde haired gene sequencer, or some underground cloud-gazer.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but the iterations and substitutions of white and yellow were a record of the whimsy, boredom, and grace of the tile worker, thick pixels laid down in some non pattern

In my upstairs bathroom we had ornate tiles, maybe 10 x 10 centimetres, bearing a herald. These tiles would repeat unvaryingly up and across, until they would hit a corner (crisis!).

While there was never a real sense of wonder, no temptation to pattern-recognition in these tiles, I was always fascinated by the constructors’ decision to break the tile here, rather than there, whether to continue on the perpendicular surface with the remaining half-tile, or start with a fresh one, and ultimately, what to do at the end of the interior – in other words, should the width and heigh of a tile surface be an integral multiple of the tile dimensions, or could it be a rational multiple?

Another category of surface was the large set tile pattern, often seen on synthetic flooring. Designed to look non-repeating, the tiles would introduce some variation, but my eye would always look for the identical whorl, and find it a few repetitions away.

My bathroom is different: picture a white marble surface, tiled together with 20 x 20 cm tilework, wherein each tile elegantly and randomly connects with its neighbours. A gold vein of clever marble abnormality runs diagonally across 8 tiles, while other subtle patterns whorl outward across their own expanses of tile.

Across the entirety of my bathroom their is no repetition – I checked – yet everything lines up perfectly. On surface appearance, what this implies is

1. A massive quarry, extracting full interior bathroom surfaces, one layer at a time
2. 2. A transportation infrastructure to process and polish these together
3. 3. Some organizational system to preserve the interior pattern
4. 4. A workman with a tremendously high-stakes challenge not to break any of the tiles they lay
5. 5. A gigantic excess bin, where the marble surface (beyond the area of my bathroom interior) gets discarded or recycled.

Altogether, the product evokes ripping tile-deep layers of immaculately preserved marble from some wonder of nature like Taroko Gorge, transporting it to my humble 1 br apartment, and flawlessly laying it on my walls. Whatever sense of luxury is connoted by my Italian induction stove, has nothing on the humblebrag prowess of my bathroom interior.

You can imagine my surprise now when I encountered my non-repeating, pattern connected marble interior.

Funny that it took so long to notice.