El Sol By Fernando Romero in collaboration with Swarovski: featured in Design Miami 2015

El Sol: by Fernando Romero in collaboration with Swarovski

photo by Nadia Bouzid

Museo Soumaya || Photo via museosoumaya.com.mx

Austrian Crystal Company Swarovski has been partnering with Design Miami/ for years, to bring in conjunction with selected artistic figures a vision of the company's famous crystals in a creative way. 

Last year Swarovski commissioned Mexican architecture and design firm FR-EE led by Fernando Romero for their yearly presentation. Fernando Romero is best known for the Soumaya Museum in Mexico CIty. 

"El Sol" presented by architect Romero, is geodesic sphere made of 2880 Swarovski crystals that was made to scale, a billion times smaller than the actual Sun.

photo by Nadia Bouzid

Inspiration for the design came from the way Aztecs and Mayans used sacred geometry for the construction of their pyramids. They were built as an aid to monitor celestial events.

"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," said Fernando Romero.  

“Man’s relationship to the sun is a fundamental part of our lives on earth. It defines our sleep cycles and how we live our lives in every way possible. At the same time, there’s still a sense of mystery to the sun and it’s something we continue to learn more and more about. Much of our work at FR-EE is directly influenced by nature and biomimicry. The sun represents life for us as much as for our ancestors,” Fernando Romero told whitewallmag.

Buckminster Fuller photo || via http://www.fuelingnewbusiness.com/

The design of "El Sol" pays tribute to Buckminster Fuller. The American Architect, system theorist, designer and inventor who created the geodesic dome. Which was based upon his idea of "doing more with less." Fuller discovered that if a spherical structure was created from triangles, it would have unparalleled strength.

photo via || bmf.org