Biosphere 2
— a glass world built to test another one.
Not only on a wall.
Biosphere 2, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Outside Oracle, Arizona, on a mesa in the Santa Catalina foothills, Biosphere 2 covers just over three acres under glass and steel — a closed ecological experiment built between 1987 and 1991. Two crews sealed themselves inside for missions in the early nineties. The University of Arizona has run the site as a research facility since 2011. The desert reads pale and the glass reads green.
The place, in three passes.
Biosphere 2 stands at about 3,900 feet on a mesa near Oracle, Arizona, roughly thirty miles north of Tucson at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains. The structure encloses 3.14 acres under glass and steel and contains five wild biomes — rainforest, ocean with coral reef, mangrove wetlands, savannah grassland, and fog desert — plus an agricultural area and the original human habitat. The University of Arizona has owned and operated the facility since 2011 as a climate and earth-systems research campus.
Biosphere 2 was built between 1987 and 1991 by Space Biosphere Ventures, funded primarily by Edward Bass. The first sealed mission ran from September 1991 to September 1993 with a crew of eight; a second, shorter mission in 1994 ended early after a management dispute. Columbia University managed the site as a research campus from 1996 to 2003, after which it sat largely dormant until the University of Arizona acquired it in 2011 and resumed climate-change and ecosystem research there.
Biosphere 2 is open to the public seven days a week with timed self-guided tours that move through the rainforest, ocean, desert, and lung structures. The campus sits at 32540 South Biosphere Road, about a forty-minute drive from central Tucson. Tour routes climb and descend stairs and pass through humid biomes, so the recommended time on site is around two hours. The University of Arizona uses revenue from tours to fund ongoing earth-systems research at the facility.
