Porcelain in Presence: From Discarded Sanitaryware to Architectural Surface

Porcelain in Presence asks a simple, uncomfortable question: could a discarded toilet become a surface you would willingly live with? Ceramic sanitaryware is fired at high temperature to reach durability, hygiene and precision, yet almost all of it leaves the building as crushed aggregate, its embodied energy discarded with it. This project reclaims that waste and casts it back into architecture as a slip-cast surface whose recycled origin is declared rather than hidden. Slip casting is central: it unlocks forms that pressing cannot, double-curved relief, hollow sections, undercuts and interlocking modules, so the recycled body becomes an articulated architectural component rather than a flat tile, holding up to half of its mass as reclaimed content while keeping the surface quality architecture demands. The work treats a material's history as a resource rather than a constraint. It also confronts the barrier that engineering alone cannot solve: acceptance. Across coupled material-engineering and perception studies, revealing an object's toilet origin reshaped how people judged it far more than any visible difference in the material itself. The same surface reads as clean or contaminated depending on what it is called. The barrier to high-value reuse proves interpretive as much as technical, and a stigmatised waste can be made to read as authentic rather than contaminated. Acceptance, in other words, is designable. Visitors meet a family of slip-cast porcelain surfaces made from genuine reclaimed sanitaryware, shown alongside the object they came from and the architectural applications they return to. Each piece appears twice: once as porcelain, once as what it once was. The distance between those two readings is the project.