The Diver

Shedding light to the dark depths is an age-long human desire. Korean female divers have submerged in the blue heart of the sea for centuries. They keep diving for food, exploring, mapping, disappearing. And it is this untiring endeavour, courage, and resolve of theirs the 17-metre long installation The Diver, floating in the interior of Lotte World Tower, is dedicated to. Designed by Maxim Velčovský, it consists of thousands of manually blown bubbles of glass mounted to a skeleton of steel.

Under the surface

“The idea was to get this sculpture, The Diver, consisting of 18 thousand glass balls, into the air. It is placed in the Lotte Tower, one of the tallest buildings on the planet, and upon entering, you see this six-metre diver, swimming above you.”

The story behind the light

Sketches

Steel skeleton and manually blown little glass balls. Installation of this kind had been dwelling deep in Maxim Velčovský’s mind for quite some time with an occasional sketch coming up every now and then. However, it was the Lotte Tower interior where at long last the idea finally surfaced from the depths of the subconscious, envisioning stories of the ancient tradition of Korean female divers.

Innovation

Surrounded and lightened by thousands of tiny manually blown glass balls, the steel skeleton appears to be suddenly weightless.

Production

This time, the technological challenge was not the sculpture’s giant dimensions, it was its tiniest components. It takes a lot of painstaking effort, to say the least, to blow more than 3000 equally small balls of glass.

Components

Every little ball is an original. Each of them is both perfect and imperfect at the same time. Perfect, yet individually inaccurate. Perhaps a little like our very own blue planet, immersed in the deep blue space.

Sculpture in space

The Diver sculpture brings organic element of water into the heart of the modern building’s technicist design, providing the entire structure with a new depth. Submerge in it. Come on. Dive in.