Lincoln Memorial
— — the room a country goes to be still.
Not only on a wall.
“White marble at the west end of the National Mall, across the Reflecting Pool from the Washington Monument. The seated figure inside is nineteen feet tall and looks toward the Capitol. People come at all hours. Mornings hold the light along the Potomac; evenings hold the words on the walls. The same steps where King spoke in August of '63 are open every night.
Lincoln Memorial, 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 memorial closes the west end of the National Mall, raised on the reclaimed flats where the Potomac once ran. Architect Henry Bacon shaped it as a Greek Doric temple; sculptor Daniel Chester French carved the seated Lincoln in Georgia marble between 1915 and 1920. President Warren Harding dedicated the building on Memorial Day, May 30, 1922. The thirty-six exterior columns count the states in the Union at Lincoln's death in 1865; the names of forty-eight stand carved above the colonnade, the count when the building opened.
Three marbles do the work. The exterior colonnade is Colorado Yule marble, white and faintly grey. The interior walls are Indiana limestone. The seated Lincoln is twenty-eight blocks of Georgia white marble, the seams cut to vanish in the folds of the coat. Daniel Chester French studied life casts of Lincoln's hands and face by Leonard Volk before carving. The Gettysburg Address fills the south chamber wall; the Second Inaugural fills the north. The carved letters were cut about an inch deep so the shadows hold the words at any hour.
Open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. There is no admission charge. Park rangers staff the chamber from roughly 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. and answer questions about the inscriptions and the King speech. The closest Metro station is Foggy Bottom on the Orange, Blue, and Silver lines, a fifteen-minute walk. The Reflecting Pool runs three hundred metres east toward the Washington Monument. Evenings draw the longest line of cameras; the late hours after eleven are the quiet ones, lit and held.