Wupatki Pueblo
— a hundred rooms the wind still moves through.
Not only on a wall.
Wupatki Pueblo, 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.
“The largest pueblo in the monument that bears its name. Wupatki spreads across a low rise above the Painted Desert, its red sandstone walls following the contour of the land. A community room, a ceremonial ballcourt, and a natural blowhole sit at its edge. From the ridge above, the structure reads like a small town the desert decided to keep. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Wupatki Pueblo is the namesake structure of Wupatki National Monument, about 35 miles northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. The pueblo was built and occupied by ancestral Puebloan people roughly between 1100 and 1250 CE, in the generations after the nearby Sunset Crater eruption around 1085 CE. At its height the building rose three stories and contained on the order of 100 rooms, making it the largest free-standing dwelling for many miles in any direction. A paved half-mile loop trail leaves the visitor center and circles the ruin.
The masonry is coursed Moenkopi sandstone, the same red rock that frames the basin, set with mud mortar and following the contour of the rise the pueblo sits on. A community room and a stone-walled ballcourt — one of the northernmost ballcourts known in the ancestral Puebloan world — sit at the base. Just beyond, a natural blowhole vents the basin's underground air, drawing visitors close in any weather. The walls today are stabilized rather than rebuilt, so what stands is largely what stood.
Wupatki National Monument is open daily during daylight hours; one per-vehicle entry covers both Wupatki and the neighboring Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument on the same loop drive. The Wupatki trail leaves the visitor center on a paved half-mile loop. The blowhole is a few steps off the path and is most active when outside air pressure is rising or falling. Summer afternoons run hot and exposed; water and shade-aware timing matter.
