You've never seen a sauna like this before.
Clad in pink titanium on the outside and leading to a wooden cave on the inside, Crystal Sauna is an unforgettable feat that mixes art, style, function and a greater purpose in Skellefteå, Sweden at the WasteLand Climate Action Park.
The sauna installation, designed by architecture duo Bigert & Bergström, sits on a hexagonal wooden deck, on land that was once one of Västerbotten County’s most polluted sites. Now, using the motto “From Waste to Promise,” the architects use Crystal Sauna to make a statement about the resilience of nature.
Architecture duo Bigert & Bergström stand in front of Crystal Sauna, their striking installation at WasteLand Climate Action Park in Skellefteå, Sweden.
“You can try to see the potential in a ruined industrial area, not only mourn what has been lost but build something new,” the architects share in the project’s announcement. “Earth’s history is full of upheavals and catastrophes that have prepared the ground for new species and forms of life.”
Every bit of Crystal Sauna has a purpose in fulfilling this dream, starting from the bright pink outside. The color, stark and unforgettable, was created through evaporating titanium and then condensing it onto sheet metal in a vacuum chamber under electrical voltage, the architects explain. The entire facade required 280 prisms to create the rock structure, which was designed as an asymmetric lithium crystal.
Construction photos courtesy Bigert & Bergström
You may think that a bright pink rock sculpture in the middle of a park would seem out of place — Crystal Sauna is anything but. The reflection of the surrounding river and forest creates a unique blend between the new structure and its natural environment.
Once you walk inside the structure itself, the wooden cave interior highly contrasts with the “high-tech exterior,” immediately bringing patrons back to a simpler time in history. Emulating an ancient cave — “a tribute to humanity’s earliest settlements in the Rift Valley in East Africa, where humans first learned to master fire,” the project specs boast — the sauna awaits. With a capacity of up to 15 people, Crystal Sauna breeds a sense of community in every breath.
Northern Swedish heartwood pine lines the floor while the sauna benches themselves are made from alder. But the real treat is the sauna heater, “hand-forged and inspired by humanity’s oldest known tool: a 2.5-million-year-old chopper from the Oldowan culture in East Africa.” Weighing 700 kilos (roughly 1,543 pounds), the heater’s surface is covered in black flint from the coast of Normandy, and holds a core of olivine stone.
Ever heard of a battery-powered sauna? Now you have.
“Through the ‘Vehicle-to-Sauna project, Skellefteå Kraft is testing and developing an innovative technology that allows an electric vehicle battery to power both the sauna and the WasteLand park,” the architects explain.
Through the use of innovative technology, cleverly placed color and style, Crystal Sauna holds true to the architects’ main purpose — turning pollution to perfection.
“The starting point was a kind of humorous take on the question of what you can do with a polluted former industrial site,” explain the architects. “The idea was to turn the perspective around and make it into an exciting pleasure — not to assume that everything is over and used up, but to transform it into something new.
“The name comes from T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land from 1922. The myth of the wasteland reminds us that every collapse also carries within it the seed of renewal. For a long time, the Scharin industrial area was a modern wasteland, a place deeply marked by industrial pollution. For us, sustainability is not only about technology or behavior, but about a necessary mental movement through the wasteland. Crystal Sauna is our way of giving form to that healing process.”
