A crystal-shaped sauna on a century of contaminated ground

A sauna has opened on the former Scharin industrial site in Skellefteå, northern Sweden. Designed by Stockholm artist duo Bigert & Bergström as part of the WasteLand Climate Action Park, the Lithium Crystal Sauna is assembled from roughly 280 faceted prisms, digitally designed and CNC-cut, clad in pink titanium-coated mirrored stainless steel and sized for twelve people.

Inside, the language reverses: heat-resistant wood veneer over a spruce frame, handmade alder benches, local heartwood pine floors, and a custom battery-operated heater holding 260 kilograms of olivine stones behind black flint cladding. The site carried more than a century of toxic pollution from pulp production and took seventeen years of remediation to reopen as public space. The lithium crystal form points at the same contradiction — a mineral central to the energy transition whose extraction does real damage. Rather than erasing that history, the mirrored shell hands the site back to whoever is looking at it.