Saarbrücken
— — a German city the French nearly kept.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of the Saarland, on a long bend of the Saar where Germany meets France. The cobbled Sankt Johanner Markt sits across the river from the baroque white face of the Ludwigskirche. The city's coal and steel century is over; the old industrial fabric now holds galleries and student cafés. The accent slips between two languages.
Saarbrücken, 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.
Saarbrücken is the capital of the Saarland, Germany's smallest federal state, set on a long bend of the Saar River about ten kilometres from the French border. The city of around 180,000 grew from a Frankish settlement at a river ford, took its name from the Saarbrücke bridge, and became the seat of the Counts of Nassau-Saarbrücken in the fifteenth century. The Saarland passed between France and Germany seven times between 1815 and 1957, when a referendum returned it to the Federal Republic.
The Ludwigskirche, raised between 1762 and 1775 by the court architect Friedrich Joachim Stengel, is one of the three great Protestant baroque churches of Germany, alongside the Dresden Frauenkirche and the Hamburg Michel. Its white-and-gold interior was rebuilt after wartime bombing; the exterior faces a planned square of patrician houses, also by Stengel. A short walk south, the Saarbrücker Schloss, originally a medieval castle, was rebuilt in the 1740s as a baroque residence and given a glass central pavilion in 1989. The two buildings frame the old centre.
The Saar runs through the city as a navigable industrial river, part of the Saar-Mosel waterway that links north to the Rhine. Until the 1980s the banks here held coking plants and a steel mill; the closures gutted the regional economy through the 1990s. The Saarpolygon, a steel sculpture by Katja Pfeiffer and Oliver Sachse raised in 2016 on a former mine spoil tip outside the city, marks the end of two hundred years of Saar coal. The river itself is now clean enough for kingfishers along the Staden promenade.