Dortmund
— — the yellow wall, and a lake where the steelworks stood.
Not only on a wall.
“The eastern anchor of the Ruhr, a city of about six hundred thousand that used to mean coal and steel and now mostly means Borussia. On Saturdays in season the Westfalenstadion fills with eighty-one thousand people and the Südtribüne — the Yellow Wall, the largest standing terrace in European football — turns the south end of the ground into a single yellow plane. South of the centre, where the Hermannshütte steelworks once stood, a man-made lake now sits at the bottom of the Phoenix West slag heap. from the studio
Dortmund, 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.
Dortmund is the largest city of the eastern Ruhr, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany, with a municipal population of just under six hundred thousand. It sits on the small river Emscher about thirty kilometres east of Essen and seventy kilometres north of Cologne. The city was a Hanseatic League member in the late Middle Ages and grew enormously in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on coal mining, steelmaking, and brewing. The last coal mine closed in 1987 and the last steelworks in 2001; the post-industrial economy now leans on logistics, insurance, biomedical research, and Technische Universität Dortmund.
The Westfalenstadion, known commercially as Signal Iduna Park, is the home of Borussia Dortmund and the largest football stadium in Germany, with a Bundesliga capacity of about eighty-one thousand three hundred and a Champions League seated capacity of around sixty-six thousand. The south stand, the Südtribüne, holds roughly twenty-four thousand nine hundred standing supporters and is the largest standing terrace in European football. On match days it is referred to as Die Gelbe Wand, the Yellow Wall. The stadium opened for the 1974 World Cup and has been expanded repeatedly since; it sits in the southern district of Hombruch next to the smaller Stadion Rote Erde.
Phoenix See is a man-made lake of about twenty-four hectares in the Hörde district, opened in 2011 on the footprint of the former Hermannshütte steelworks. The steelworks closed in 2001, the site was excavated to nine metres of depth, and the lake was filled from the Emscher river beginning in 2010. A promenade of cafés, apartments, and a sailing school now wraps the shore; the slag-heap hill of Phoenix West, with its preserved blast-furnace skeleton, rises to the north. The Hörde tower of the old castle still stands at the eastern end of the lake, predating the steelworks by some six centuries.