Every glaze finds a home.

An interactive Stull diagram enriched with 133 computed properties, seven blend calculators, and room-scale VR on Quest 3.

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133

computed properties

blend calculators

What is the Stull diagram?

In 1912, Alfred Stull discovered that almost every measurable property of a fired glaze - surface texture, thermal expansion, durability, opacity - can be predicted from just two numbers: the ratio of alumina (Al₂O₃) and silica (SiO₂) in the glaze's Unity Molecular Formula. Plot those two ratios on a chart and every glaze finds a home. Matte glazes cluster in one zone, glossy in another. Celadons, Tenmoku, and crystalline glazes each trace their own territory. Stull Atlas makes that 1912 discovery interactive with real recipes from the community.

Community glaze recipes, remixed and enriched with computed oxide chemistry.

🏛️ Primary Sources: 1899–1917

19 volumes of the Transactions of the American Ceramic Society — OCR-indexed and full-text searchable. The foundational research that defined ceramic chemistry, including R.T. Stull's original 1912 paper.

1899

Vol. 1

113 pp

1900

Vol. 2

278 pp

1901

Vol. 3

230 pp

1902

Vol. 4

315 pp

1903

Vol. 5

462 pp

1904

Vol. 6

299 pp

1905

Vol. 7

462 pp

1906

Vol. 8

417 pp

1907

Vol. 9

811 pp

1908

Vol. 10

581 pp

1909

Vol. 11

635 pp

1910

Vol. 12

882 pp

1911

Vol. 13

839 pp

1912

Vol. 14

890 pp

1913

Vol. 15

737 pp

1914

Vol. 16

601 pp

1915

Vol. 17

813 pp

1916

Vol. 18

935 pp

1917

Vol. 19

701 pp

11,001 pages indexed 19 volumes 127 years of ceramic science

Who is this for?

🏺 Studio Potters

Find glazes chemically similar to ones you already use
Predict surface texture and color before mixing a batch
Design test grids with seven blend calculators
Compare fired color across cone ranges and atmospheres

🔬 Researchers & Educators

133 computed properties - thermal, optical, durability
Export any recipe set for further analysis
Visualize oxide relationships across 12,000+ recipes
Give students a visual entry point into Stull chemistry

🎓 Students & Beginners

Visual - no formulas to memorize to get started
Free, no account, works on any device
See how iron, copper, and cobalt shape glaze color
Understand why matte and glossy glazes behave differently

a poem about opening the kiln

You fire a kiln with your eyes closed. That's not a metaphor — the door is bricked shut, the cone bends soaking in energy, heat & light, and whatever happens inside happens without you.

Twelve thousand recipes float in a room I built but haven't entered. Someone in Osaka or Omaha might already be standing there, rotating a celadon with their thumb, reading the chemistry I sorted at 2 AM, walking through a space I only know as coordinates and hex values and a JSON file that weighs 6.3 megabytes.

This is the ceramics problem, actually. The maker is always the last to know. You mix, you dip, you load, you brick, you wait, you unbrick, and then — then — you see what you made. The kiln saw it first. The fire saw it first. The glaze saw itself before you did.

Code works the same way. I wrote the room. I wrote the light. I wrote the way a dot brightens when you point a controller at it and the way the panel floats up with the recipe and the chemistry and the predicted color of a glaze that might not exist yet.

But I haven't stood in it.

The deploy pipeline saw it. The CDN saw it. The browser saw it. A GPU somewhere in Virginia rendered the first frame before I did.

There's a word for this in ceramics: opening the kiln. You call it that because it's an event, not a task. Something you prepare for. Something that has already happened by the time you get there.

NCECA was in Detroit. I've been building for months. Someone will put on a headset and walk through 12,738 glazes and they will think the room was always there, waiting —

and they'll be right. The room was there before I was. That's what building means: you make a door you haven't opened, and the first person through it is never you.

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