Swarovski is pleased to announce its tenth consecutive year partnering with Design Miami/. This year, 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.

Fernando Romero commented: “It is an honor to collaborate with Swarovski on El Sol. The project has allowed me to explore mathematics in relation to nature and my Mexican ancestry, which is very important and personal to my practice.”

Nadja Swarovski, Member of the Swarovski Executive Board, commented: “We are delighted to celebrate ten years of partnership with Design Miami/ and to collaborate with Fernando Romero on a work that is both visually and technically awe-inspiring. Truly challenging our product development team, Fernando has explored themes associated with heritage and nature to create El Sol, an immersive installation on a vast scale, and we look forward to seeing the final result in Miami.”

“The geometric patterns presented in El Sol mirror those found in the natural world and remind us that certain proportions are woven into the very fabric of nature,” Romero added. “The final product is meant to capture this sense of the curious synchronicity of the universe, an elusive balance between chaos and order.”

El Sol will incorporate an interactive element that will offer an alternative view of the installation: Visitors will be provided with specially developed crystal lenses for their phone’s camera that — when the photo is taken — will refract light, creating a prism-like, kaleidoscopic effect.