Kuwait Towers
— — the gulf held inside three blue discs.
Not only on a wall.
“Three towers on the curve of the Kuwait City corniche, the tallest rising one hundred and eighty-seven metres above the Gulf. The two larger spheres carry water reservoirs and an observation deck; the third holds equipment that lights the others after dark. They opened in 1979 and have read as the country's signature on the skyline ever since.
Kuwait Towers, 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.
Kuwait Towers stand at Ras Ajuza on the eastern edge of Kuwait City, where the corniche curves into the Persian Gulf. Designed by the Swedish architects Sune Lindström and Malene Björn, the group was inaugurated on 1 March 1979. The main tower rises one hundred and eighty-seven metres and holds a restaurant at fifty-two metres and a revolving observation deck at one hundred and twenty-three. The two larger spheres together hold more than nine thousand cubic metres of water for the city.
The spheres are clad in roughly forty-one thousand enamelled steel discs in eight shades of blue, green, and grey, an effect Malene Björn drew from the tile traditions of Islamic architecture. From a distance the cladding reads as a single shifting blue; up close the geometry resolves into a fish-scale grid. The discs were fabricated in Iran and shipped to Kuwait during construction in the mid-1970s. The colour shifts with the Gulf light through the day and turns near-black at dusk.
The main tower reopened to visitors in 2012 after a long restoration and a second refit in 2019. The revolving observation deck completes a turn every thirty minutes and looks across the Gulf toward Failaka Island. A ticketed café sits below the deck. The towers are reached from the corniche road in central Kuwait City; the area is walkable from the Salmiya district. The site closes during the hottest midday hours in summer and stays open into the evening when the lighting cycle starts.