Aarhus
— a small city that paints its own sky.
Not only on a wall.
“Denmark's second city, a Viking port turned student town turned design capital, on the east coast of Jutland. ARoS, the art museum at the centre of town, wears Olafur Eliasson's rainbow ring above the rooftops, a circle of coloured glass you walk through to see the city through every colour at once. Below, the harbour and the old Latin Quarter hold the rest of the day.
Aarhus, 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.
Aarhus sits on the east coast of the Jutland peninsula, on the bay of Aarhus Bugt, about 117 miles by road northwest of Copenhagen. Roughly 290,000 people live in the city proper, making it Denmark's second-largest after Copenhagen. The settlement was founded by Vikings in the eighth century under the name Aros, and the harbour has worked continuously since. Aarhus University, founded in 1928, anchors a student population of more than forty thousand and shapes the daily life of the centre.
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum opened in 2004 and crowned itself in 2011 with Olafur Eliasson's Your rainbow panorama, a circular 150-metre walkway of coloured glass set 3.5 metres above the museum roof. Walking the full ring carries the visitor through every wavelength of the visible spectrum while the city below shifts colour with each step. It is the most photographed structure in Aarhus and the colour palette the rest of the city now quietly references.
The city's year turns on a few set pieces. The Aarhus Festival in late August fills the streets for ten days with music, theatre, and food. The Aarhus Jazz Festival runs each July. Northside, the summer rock festival, takes over Ådalen in June. In February the SPOT Festival showcases new Nordic music. The European Capital of Culture year, held here in 2017, left a wider cultural infrastructure that has kept the calendar full ever since.