FR-EE for Swarovski

In its tenth consecutive year partnering with Design Miami/, Swarovski commissioned Fernando Romero Enterprise (FR-EE), the Mexico-City-based global architecture and design practice, to create an installation that explores man’s relationship with the sun. Entitled El Sol, the installation is a vast geodesic structure, designed to scale, one billion times smaller than the sun, and composed of 2,880 custom–made precision-cut Swarovski crystals.

El Sol is inspired by the sacred geometry used by the ancient Aztecs and Mayans in constructing their pyramids, which were designed as a means to monitor celestial events. FR-EE’s founder and creative director Fernando Romero endeavored to pay homage to this legacy while also employing modern technologies in creating the structure, which required over 350 hours of engineering work and three months of design and technical development and which was made at Swarovski’s headquarters in Wattens, Austria.

El Sol features a spherical cut-out internal structure, and a smooth outer surface made up of an intricate puzzle of four different types of specially developed precision-cut crystals covered in Swarovski’s iconic Aurora Borealis coating. Faceted internally, the crystals augment the light emitted from the installation’s core; a spherical pool of LEDs whose light is refracted by the facets of the crystals, evoking the sun’s gaseous, moving terrain.

Additionally, Swarovski has partnered with the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in the UK on a soundscape for the installation. The track, provided by their international BiSON project, is the “sound” of the Sun made up of acoustic waves, formed from decades of data captured by spectrometers observing the Sun since the 1970’s. The Sun rings like a bell, with the central frequency of this sound being far below human hearing at 0.003 Hz. The sounds visitors will hear have been increased in speed by 100,000 times bringing it up to 300 Hz and into the range of human hearing.

El Sol will incorporate two interactive elements within the installation. Visitors will be offered an alternative view of the installation – through a specially developed crystal lenses for their phone’s camera that—when the photo is taken—will refract light, creating a prism-like, kaleidoscopic effect. The second interactive user experience will incorporate Videri’s high visual fidelity, ultra-thin digital displays, and a new early stage innovation from Swarovski’s R&D labs, functional crystals, which will offer a new way to interact with digital media. The functional crystal highlights the perhaps hidden, yet core role of technology in the industries served by Swarovski Crystal Business.

2–6 December 2015
El Sol
Design: Fernando Romero FR- EE
Client: Swarovski
Design Miami/, Miami