With a legacy of 35 years, the Festival of Trees is an annual fundraising event for FIU’s Interior Architecture students and programs. Each year, Festival of the Trees sponsors underwrite designers who design and build their unique holiday creations and donate the art pieces to the fundraising event. The “trees” are set on display at the gala opening and at the end of the evening the attendees are provided with the opportunity to make a donation to obtain and claim a beautiful holiday tree with them. The theme for this year’s tree is “The Future of Space.”

Our team’s submission was called “Interwoven Horizons”, and it’s a piece about connecting faraway worlds and life in space. It mixes art and science, blending the beauty of string theory with human life. Delicate strings hang in its design, representing the universe’s fabric and its mysteries. These strings stand for unexplored places and what we can discover beyond Earth. In this art piece, there are little gardens, like terrariums, showing the environments in space. These miniature ecosystems, carefully nurtured and tended to, embody our longing to bring life and sustainability into the cosmic void. “Interwoven” tells us about human creativity and curiosity. It asks us to look at the universe’s secrets and shows that we want to live in space with art and science side by side.

The project won an Honorable Mention on Most Elegant Artpiece.