Press Centre
November 2009
Greg Lynn creates Hi-Tech Installation for SWAROVSKI CRYSTAL PALACE at Design Miami
Award-winning architect Greg Lynn, renowned for his innovative designs involving computer technology creating biomorphic structures, will be creating an ambitious and highly atmospheric installation for Swarovski Crystal Palace at this year’s Design Miami, which runs from 1 – 5 December 2009 in Miami’s Design District.
Located at the entrance to the Designers’ Lounge, the structure will take the form of space extending over 80 square metres and reaching over 7 metres in height, where the ‘walls’ and ‘ceiling’ are made of Swarovski crystal-encrusted suspended panels “sails” whose moulded, curved and billowing shapes overlap and intersect. The installation uses cutting edge technology from the sailing and ship-building/nautical industry in which carbon and aramid fibres are compressed between transparent sheets of Mylar to make astonishingly strong, lightweight and transparent sails that are less than 1mm thick. “The sails are made to cope with massive loads from the wind,” Lynn comments. “It’s like hanging 3 SUVs off a paper thin sheet.” Lynn has taken this technology to create his sculptural composition, incorporating thousands of Swarovski crystals.
"When Swarovski asked me if I had any ideas about how to integrate crystals into large scale elements I recalled my first visit to the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2002,” Lynn recalls. “I only had a few hours in the city and the first thing I saw was a light designed by Tord Boontje for Swarovski Crystal Palace. I was knocked out by the way that wire was used to hold the crystals not in hanging ropes but in branches suspended in space. Any time a classical typology is re-imagined I get excited. So when Swarovski contacted me, I immediately thought of the translucent laminate sails as a way of getting the crystals suspended in the air - not as an object but as a sheet or surface through which light could pass and be reflected. Like the chandeliers the array would be diaphanous but with their curved surfaces these ‘fabrics’ could also define spaces and make enclosures in the form of suspended ceilings, room partitions or even walls.”
The panels in Lynn’s installation will feature three different coloured fibres; black carbon fibre and aramid both in its ‘natural’ gold and in a crimson-died version. These fibres will be woven and incorporated in different ways, blending to create richly nuanced colours. Set amongst these fibres will be thousands of tiny clear and coloured crystals, with hues including acquamarine, pink, red, peach and blue, which will contribute to reflection, highlights and also surface washes of colour.
More than 1,500,000 crystals and more than 117,000 meters of carbon and aramid fibers have been used to create the panels for this installation, which were assembled by computer-guided robots on dynamically formed molds at the North Sails 3DL factory. The panels vary in size, with some as long as 14 m and as wide as 8m. The material is so thin that even panels with a surface area of over 50 square meters can easily be folded and packed into the trunk of a passenger car. The entire installation, including the weight of the crystals, weighs less than 350 kg.
