Concordia’s Tunnel: Time for (Ad)dressing Surfaces

Coordinated by Amanda Zhang, student in the Graduate Certificate in Curatorial Studies and Practices

Project for the Fall 2025 course ARTH 264 Aspects of the History of Ceramics taught by Dr. Susan Surette

Students in ARTH 264 Ceramic Tiles (Ad)dressing Surfaces” submitted these tile installation designs as part of their final assignment. The students were tasked with developing their own tile installation that would improve the dismal, but frequently used, concrete tunnel connecting Concordia’s Library and EV Buildings and giving access to the STM Guy Metro station.

Each student chose a topic for their installation that would be appropriate for public art in this specific space. Based on inspirations from historic and modern ceramic tiles studied in the course, the students were to design several individual geometric and figurative tiles and a pictorial tile panel. These tiles could be for either the floor or wall(s), or both, and they could repeat over the whole surfaces or be applied to a specific area in the tunnel. The students were then to arrange their tiles to demonstrate how they would appear in the tunnel space.

The student submissions considered the myriad social, physical, and political functions ascribed to public tile installations, including the social and psychological uses of decoration, the roles of peripheral and focused vision, architectural phenomenology (including directionality), conservation, and national and institutional ideologies.