Shah Alam
— a planned city built around a single blue dome.
Not only on a wall.
“The state capital of Selangor, twenty-five kilometres west of Kuala Lumpur and built almost from scratch after 1978. The skyline belongs to the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Mosque, known locally as the Blue Mosque, whose dome and four minarets rise above a man-made lake and a grid of administrative boulevards. The mosque holds twenty-four thousand worshippers and shows blue tile in every direction the light finds it.
Shah Alam, 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.
Shah Alam was designated capital of Selangor in 1978, after Kuala Lumpur was carved out as a federal territory, and was planned and built largely from scratch on former rubber and oil-palm estates. The city of roughly 740,000 sits about twenty-five kilometres west of KL along the Federal Highway, on the Klang river basin. Section 14, around the lake gardens and the Blue Mosque, forms the civic centre; the surrounding numbered sections were laid out on a grid of wide boulevards designed for the car.
The Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Mosque was completed in 1988 and remains the largest mosque in Malaysia, with a main prayer hall for twenty-four thousand worshippers. Its aluminium dome is 51.2 metres across and 106.7 metres at the apex; the four minarets reach 142.3 metres, the second-tallest of any mosque in the world. The blue and silver dome and the geometric Kufic calligraphy ringing the interior earned it the everyday name Masjid Biru, the Blue Mosque, which is now the city's signature image.
Non-Muslim visitors are welcome outside of the five daily prayer windows; the mosque office at the south entrance loans robes and headscarves at no charge. The hall is closed to tour groups during Friday midday prayer and during Ramadan evenings. The grounds around Tasik Shah Alam open from dawn, and the dome reads bluest about forty minutes before sunset, when the western light catches the tile and the lake holds the reflection. KTM Komuter trains run from KL Sentral in thirty minutes.