Hamburg
— — a port city that built its concert hall on top of a warehouse.
Not only on a wall.
“Hamburg sits on the Elbe about a hundred kilometres inland from the North Sea — Germany's largest port and its second-largest city. The old warehouse district, Speicherstadt, runs in red brick along narrow canals. Above it the Elbphilharmonie rises in glass, a concert hall placed on top of a 1960s cocoa warehouse. The water is always doing something. Ferries cross the harbour like buses.
Hamburg, 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.
Hamburg lies on the lower Elbe River about 110 kilometres from the river's mouth on the North Sea, making it Germany's busiest seaport and one of the largest in Europe. The Free and Hanseatic City has a population of roughly 1.9 million. Its medieval Hanseatic charter survives in the official name and in the red-brick architecture of its old quarters. The Alster, dammed in the thirteenth century, forms two lakes in the centre of the city around which the modern downtown grew.
The warehouse district called Speicherstadt was built between 1883 and 1927 on a network of oak pilings driven into the Elbe marsh, the largest continuous warehouse complex in the world, in unified red-brick Gothic Revival. UNESCO inscribed it in 2015. Across the channel the Elbphilharmonie opened in January 2017: a wave-shaped glass concert hall placed on top of the preserved Kaispeicher A warehouse from 1963, by Herzog and de Meuron. The two buildings face each other across the Sandtorhafen basin.
The Port of Hamburg covers about 7,200 hectares along both banks of the Elbe, handling roughly 8 million container units a year and ranking third in Europe behind Rotterdam and Antwerp. Public ferries run by the city's transit authority HVV carry commuters across the harbour for the price of a bus ticket. North of the central station the river's old tributary was dammed to form the Binnenalster and Aussenalster lakes, where Hamburgers sail in summer and skate in hard winters. The fish market at Altona has opened at five on Sunday mornings since 1703.