Gelsenkirchen
— — a coal city that learned to grow green.
Not only on a wall.
“A Ruhr-valley city of about 260,000 that ran on coal for a century and is still working out what to be next. The pithead winding towers are mostly quiet now, and the old slag heaps have been planted over and turned into parks with views across the basin. The studio reads Gelsenkirchen as a place that does not pretend the industry never happened, and is more honest for it. — from the studio
Gelsenkirchen, 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.
Gelsenkirchen sits in the Ruhr industrial region of North Rhine-Westphalia, between Essen to the west and Dortmund to the east, about 30 km north of Düsseldorf. The city has roughly 260,000 residents and is bisected by the Rhine-Herne Canal, an 1899-built waterway that connects the Rhine to the inland coal network. Before the first hard-coal shaft opened in 1855, this was farmland; within fifty years Gelsenkirchen was one of the densest mining cities in Europe, briefly called the city of a thousand fires.
The last hard-coal mine in Gelsenkirchen, Bergwerk Hugo, closed in 2000, ending 145 years of continuous mining inside the city limits; the Ruhr region's final colliery closed nearby at Bottrop in 2018. Nordsternpark, opened on a former pit head for the 1997 federal garden show, now sits on top of the old Nordstern colliery with a 1.8 km canal frontage and Markus Lüpertz's Hercules sculpture on the winding tower. The city has shifted slowly toward services, solar manufacturing, and football tourism.
Football organises the calendar here. FC Schalke 04, founded in 1904 in the Schalke district, has won seven German championships and plays at the Veltins-Arena, a 62,271-seat stadium with a retractable roof and a sliding pitch that rolls outside for sunlight between matches. Match days fill the U-Bahn from Essen and Dortmund. The ZOOM Erlebniswelt zoo, restructured in 2005 around Alaska, Africa, and Asia continents, draws about a million visitors a year and is the city's other reliable draw.