Dome of the Rock
— — gold held above the oldest stone.
Not only on a wall.
“An octagonal shrine on the limestone platform Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews call the Temple Mount. Built in the late seventh century, its gilded dome catches the first morning light and the last evening light, both. The blue tiles of the upper walls were laid in the time of Suleiman. From the studio: a place where every angle is freighted with meaning. — from the studio
Dome of the Rock, 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.
The Dome of the Rock stands at the centre of the thirty-five-acre walled platform in the Old City of Jerusalem known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The shrine was completed in 691 or 692 CE under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, making it the oldest surviving work of Islamic architecture. Its octagonal plan covers a outcrop of bedrock revered in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition. The site lies within the UNESCO-listed Old City inscribed in 1981.
The exposed bedrock at the centre, the Foundation Stone, rises about two metres above the surrounding floor and measures roughly seventeen by thirteen metres. Jewish tradition holds it as the site of the binding of Isaac and the holy of holies of the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 CE. Islamic tradition associates it with the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey. Around the rock runs a wooden screen; beneath it lies a small cave known as the Well of Souls.
The aluminium-and-bronze dome was re-gilded in 1993 with eighty kilograms of gold donated by King Hussein of Jordan, replacing the anodised aluminium that had covered it since the 1960s. The blue, green, and white tilework on the upper exterior walls dates to a sixteenth-century commission by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who replaced the original Umayyad mosaics. At dawn and at the last hour before sunset the gold reads warm against the pale Jerusalem stone of the surrounding city.