Karlsruhe
— a city laid out like a folding fan.
Not only on a wall.
“A planned city in Baden-Württemberg, founded in 1715 when Margrave Karl Wilhelm drew thirty-two streets radiating out from his palace like the ribs of a fan. The shape still holds. Today the palace anchors a quiet city of about three hundred thousand, home to Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and the country's first university of technology.
Karlsruhe, 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.
Karlsruhe sits on the upper Rhine plain in northern Baden-Württemberg, about 80 kilometres south of Frankfurt and 15 kilometres east of the French border. The city was founded on 17 June 1715 by Margrave Karl Wilhelm of Baden-Durlach, who laid it out as a baroque Fächerstadt, a fan city, with thirty-two streets radiating from his new palace. The plan still reads on a map. The modern city of about 310,000 hosts the Federal Constitutional Court, the Federal Court of Justice, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, established in 1825 as Germany's first polytechnic.
The civic centre is built largely in the reddish sandstone of the nearby Pfalz, quarried in the surrounding hills and shipped down the Rhine. The Marktplatz Pyramid, designed by Friedrich Weinbrenner and completed in 1825, sits over the crypt of Karl Wilhelm and is the city's official landmark. Weinbrenner shaped much of the neoclassical core in the early nineteenth century, including the Stadtkirche and the Rondellplatz. Allied bombing in 1944 destroyed about a third of these buildings; the rebuilt facades follow the original elevations closely.
Karlsruhe Palace, completed in 1718 and rebuilt after wartime damage, houses the Badisches Landesmuseum and is open Tuesday to Sunday. The ZKM Center for Art and Media on Lorenzstrasse, housed in a converted munitions factory, is one of the world's leading institutions for media art and exhibits works by Nam June Paik and Bill Viola in its permanent collection. The Botanical Garden and the Marktplatz pyramid, the city's geographic centre and the tomb of its founder, anchor the southern half of the fan.