Mosaic Cartoon Penguin — Aquarium Plaza Sculpture, Genoa

An aquarium in the old port of Genoa wanted a penguin, which is the most over-supplied subject in the world, and the only way to do it was to change the material out from under it.

Why mosaic, and why it is not decoration

Genoa has been laying mosaic for centuries and the city reads as a mosaic from the pavement up. Setting a penguin as tesserae also solves a real problem: a 2.6 m penguin painted in flat black and white is a large dark object that photographs as a silhouette, whereas a penguin cut into eleven thousand small pieces moves as you walk around it, because every tile sits at a slightly different angle to the light.

Laying a mosaic on a bird

The shell is fibreglass and the tesserae were cut by hand from 4 mm ceramic, roughly 18 mm square and deliberately not uniform, then bedded in a flexible adhesive in a bed about 3 mm deep over a scored ground. The grout is recessed 2 mm below the tile face, which is what gives the surface its shadow and is the part that most people do not notice and would immediately miss if it were flush.

No repeating pattern

Eleven thousand tiles in five colour families, laid with no module repeated anywhere on the piece. The blue family carries the back and the head, the warmer tones are concentrated on the belly and the feet, and the layout was worked out on the finished form so that the density of the pale tiles increases where the light falls off, which keeps the silhouette readable from across the plaza.

One tile out

There is a single white tile on the left flank set 1.5 mm proud of its neighbours. It was left in after it refused to bed down, and the client asked for it to stay. Children find it within ten seconds of arriving, which is a better engagement device than anything we could have designed on purpose.

On the plaza

It stands at 2.6 m just inside the entrance canopy, facing the water rather than the doors, so that it appears in the background of photographs taken by people photographing the harbour. The client’s own note is in the panel above.