Baku
— — a walled old city under three towers of flame.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital wrapped around a wind-scoured bay on the Caspian. Inside the medieval walls the lanes are narrow stone and caravanserai courtyards. Outside them, the boulevard runs for kilometres along the water, and three curved glass towers rise behind the skyline and turn the colour of fire after dark. The wind off the sea is constant. It is why the city is called Baku. — from the studio
Baku, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan, on the southern tip of the Absheron Peninsula on the west shore of the Caspian Sea. It is the largest city on the Caspian and the lowest-lying national capital in the world, sitting about 28 metres below sea level. The metropolitan area holds roughly 2.3 million people, more than a fifth of the country's population. Baku has been continuously settled for at least a thousand years and grew rapidly from the 1870s, when it became one of the first industrial oil cities and supplied, at its peak, about half the world's petroleum.
İçərişəhər, the walled Old City, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 and covers about 22 hectares behind a circuit of twelfth-century fortifications. Inside the walls stand the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, built in the fifteenth century as the seat of the local dynasty, and the Maiden Tower, a cylindrical stone monument 29 metres high whose exact date of construction is still debated. The Old City's lanes were shaped before the automobile and remain too narrow for one. Caravanserai courtyards now hold tea houses, and the original mosque of Muhammad, dated to 1078, still stands at the corner of two of them.
The Flame Towers rise behind the Old City on the hill above the bay, three curved glass buildings 182 metres tall, completed in 2012 and designed by HOK. By day they read as silvered blue against the sky. After dark they become the city's primary light show: about ten thousand LED panels turn the three façades into a single moving image, cycling between flames, the national flag, and a falling waterfall of light. The display is visible from across the bay and almost everywhere on the Caspian boulevard.