lithium crystal forms inspire this mirrored pink sauna on sweden’s reclaimed wasteland

Tomas Kauer - News Writer and News Moderator

lithium crystal forms inspire this mirrored pink sauna on sweden’s reclaimed wasteland

pink steel wraps crystalline forms

Along the Skellefte River in northern Sweden, this faceted Lithium Crystal Sauna catches the water, the trees, and the recovering ground around it. Bigert & Bergström’s pink project stands at the center of WasteLand, a climate action park built on the former Scharin industrial site, where contaminated land has been remediated over seventeen years and opened as a public landscape for art, ecology, and gathering.

The fully functioning sauna is the permanent centerpiece of the park, which opens in connection with Society Expo 2026 under the motto From Waste to Promise.

WasteLand has taken shape in one of the region’s former polluted industrial areas, and brings climate research, public art, and landscape repair into a site shaped by extraction. The sauna stands as a symbol of the initiative by turning a material associated with energy transition into a place for gathering.

lithium crystal sauna sweden
Bigert & Bergström’s Lithium Crystal Sauna occupies WasteLand climate action park | images © Jean Baptiste Béranger

a sauna to symbolize a history of land extraction

The Stockholm-based team at Bigert & Bergström shape the sauna as an asymmetrical lithium crystal, a reference that moves between technology and the body. Lithium sits inside batteries and electrification systems, while the same element has long been used in mental health treatment. Here, that double meaning becomes physical, held in a tilted volume clad in stainless steel mirrors with a pink titanium coating.

The sculpture takes shape with a steel structure wrapped in reflective panels that bend the surrounding river and forest across its surface. Inside, the mirror skin gives way to a warm wood grotto lined with alder and heartwood pine, with flint and olivine stones around the heater. Copper, glass, LEDs, insulation, and ventilation complete the technical layer, allowing the work to operate as a public sauna while keeping its sculptural edge.

lithium crystal sauna sweden
the public sauna is shaped as a lithium crystal and clad in pink titanium-coated mirror steel

inside sweden’s wasteland climate action park

Around the Lithium Crystal Sauna, WasteLand gathers works that read the landscape of Sweden through cycles of repair, contamination, and possible futures. Bigert & Bergström also present Rundgång at the park, while Broken Greenhouse brings climate scenarios into a series of sculptural greenhouse environments. Other works use reclaimed trees, plants, seeds, and play structures to build a wider public setting around the remediated ground.

For Bigert & Bergström, the sauna continues a practice that often makes climate and social questions physical. Their earlier Solar Egg brought a communal sauna to Kiruna, where mining has forced the relocation of the city.

In Skellefteå, Lithium Crystal Sauna carries a similar charge in a different landscape. Its mirrored shell reflects a site still in transition, while the heat inside turns the artwork into a shared room, where energy, extraction, and public ritual meet at human scale.

lithium crystal sauna sweden
the faceted exterior reflects the recovering industrial landscape around it