A Soviet-Era Tile and Roadside Soil: Soily

In surface materials colour is usually a matter of decision: a glaze is chosen, a pigment measured. An entry added to the Future Materials Bank in April 2026 hands that decision to the ground.

The ingredients field for Gabriele Daminaityte's material, called Soily, runs to three items: reclaimed clinker body, site specific soil, transparent glaze. The entry gives Germany and Lithuania as places of making; the clinker tiles are salvaged from Soviet-era buildings in Lithuania, the soil taken from a German roadside.

The dimensions are in the entry too: 245 × 55 mm and 150 × 150 mm. This is not a laboratory sample but something at tile scale.

The material's logic rests on recycling twice over. First the body: clinker salvaged from demolished or renovated buildings becomes a body again. Then the surface: its colour and texture come from the soil of the place the tile will sit in. The transparent glaze does not cover that soil, it fixes it.

What is interesting here in design terms is the acceptance of irreproducibility. Two tiles made to the same recipe in two different places will not be the same colour, because the soil is not the same. Batch consistency, the most basic expectation of industrial production, is deliberately given up.

Beneath the entry sits the archive's own note: the text was submitted by the maker and edited by Future Materials Bank. That is useful information about how the archive works: entries are the maker's statement, not criticism written by the archive.

On the image side the same limit applies. The entry carries the credit "Photos by Gabriele Daminaityte", but the archive publishes no image-use licence. The image accompanying this article was therefore taken not from the archive but from an openly licensed collection.