Worlds Carved In Rock
Here, making space meant removing stone. Follow the facades, chambers and sanctuaries cut into the landscape.
01 · Jordan · c. 300 BC
Petra
The Bedouin who lived among the tombs had a theory about the urn. High on the facade of the building they called the Treasury, carved from the same rose sandstone as everything else, sits a stone vessel about three metres tall.
Read the story02 · Saudi Arabia · c. 1
Hegra
The first thing you notice at Hegra is what is not there. No city skyline, no walls, no row of temples. There are outcrops of rock standing apart from one another on a sand plain, and some of them have had one face flattened into a facade.
Read the story03 · India · c. 600
Ellora Caves
Walk into the tenth cave at Ellora and look up. The ceiling is a barrel vault made of ribs, evenly spaced and slightly curved, exactly like the timber roof of a hall. Every one of those beams is stone. They were cut out of the living rock, deliberately shaped to look like carpentry that was never there.
Read the story04 · Ethiopia · c. 1200
Rock-Hewn Churches Of Lalibela
You walk up to the edge of a pit and look down. At the bottom, standing in a trench cut into reddish volcanic rock, is a church shaped like a perfect cross when seen from above. Its roof is level with the ground you are standing on.
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