A pink, faceted sculpture sits on the edge of a former industrial wasteland in northern Sweden, catching the river and forest across its mirrored steel skin. It looks like something that fell from a fever dream. Or like a prop someone left behind after filming a sci-fi movie. Look closer and you’ll realize it’s a sauna. A fully functioning, publicly accessible sauna shaped like a giant lithium crystal. And it’s one of the most quietly radical things built in 2026.
The Lithium Crystal Sauna is the work of Stockholm-based artist duo Bigert & Bergström, installed at WasteLand, a newly inaugurated climate action park in Skellefteå, Sweden. The park sits on land that was, not long ago, a polluted industrial site, a place shaped by a century of extraction, production, and environmental consequence. That context is not incidental to the work. It’s the entire point.
Designer: Bigert & Bergström
From the outside, the sauna is clad in pink titanium-coated mirror steel, its asymmetrical facets borrowing their geometry from the structure of an actual lithium crystal. It doesn’t blend into the landscape. It confronts it. The mirrored panels throw back whatever surrounds it: the recovering forest, the river, the sky, and presumably your own reflection looking slightly baffled and very impressed. As a sculptural object, it earns its place on a shortlist of the most visually arresting public art installations of recent memory.
But walking through the door changes everything. Inside, the industrial exterior gives way completely to a warm wooden grotto lined with alder and heartwood pine. Flint and olivine stones sit around the heater. Copper, glass, and LEDs complete the interior. The hexagonal seating echoes the crystal geometry of the outer shell, a small detail that rewards anyone paying attention. The whole space is built to create what the designers describe as a contrasting sensory experience, and the contrast delivers. Going from a mirrored shell to a wood cave is as disorienting as it is beautiful, and I mean that as a compliment.
The material choice of lithium is pointed. Lithium is the mineral at the center of the global battery economy, the thing inside electric vehicles and renewable energy storage systems, and also the driver of a new wave of mining pressure on landscapes not unlike the one WasteLand now occupies. By building a sauna in the shape of a lithium crystal and powering it with a battery, Bigert & Bergström make an argument without saying a word. The Lithium Crystal Sauna is the world’s first battery-powered sauna, running on electricity from standalone batteries and electric vehicles. Through the “Vehicle-to-Sauna” project, Swedish energy company Skellefteå Kraft is developing technology that allows an electric vehicle battery to power both the sauna and the surrounding park. It is, depending on your disposition, either delightfully clever or almost too on-the-nose. Possibly both.
For those familiar with Bigert & Bergström’s earlier work, the Solar Egg, a golden egg-shaped sauna installed in Kiruna where mining had literally forced the city to relocate, this feels like a continuation of a practice that consistently uses warmth, community, and the ritual of the sauna to process what we do to the land we live on. Both works are beautiful. Both carry weight. The difference is that Lithium Crystal Sauna arrives at a moment when the conversation around the green transition has grown more complicated, when the environmental cost of the technologies we’re counting on to save us is harder to look away from.
That’s the tension the piece holds without resolving. It doesn’t tell you how to feel about lithium mining or energy transition or the long afterlife of industrial landscapes. It puts you inside all of that, quite literally, makes it warm, and lets you sweat. Good art makes you sit with the uncomfortable question. Great art makes that sitting feel almost pleasant. This one heats you up and lets you figure out the rest.
