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Italian architect Alessandro Mendini with the Cartier column of more than 17,000 carats of gems

Cartier Art Basel Miami Beach

Unused gems are transformed into a precious column

It's a gem of an idea.

Cartier approached renowned Italian architect Alessandro Mendini to create an object d'art using fine and precious gems that can no longer be used in classical jewelry as the stones have been pierced, dismounted, and engraved.

Mendini took the gems and created a precious column of pearls, emeralds, sapphires, mandarin garnets, moonstones, diamonds, chalcedonies and rubies and constructed a column almost eight feet high. The piece incorporates 50 pounds of 18 kt pink gold and more than 17,000 carats of gems.

"The Cartier Column project is so exceptional that it has no modern-day equivalent," Mendini states. "I believe this may be the first time that an artist has been commissioned to freely conceive an object x using literally thousands of stunning and perfectly-cut gems. Such a profusion of large jewels only existed in the treasures of medieval churches and of kings and sultans as pieces of extreme rarity, relics or symbols of devotion and ostentation. But those days have since passed."

Mendini concentrated on creating a context for the gems that had no relationship to the past, or even the present.

"I wanted the viewer to forget for one moment the folly and drama of the contemporary world and be struck by the purity of gems, pearls, and precious stones, materials of nature that stand the test of time."

He designed a gold-plated cylinder with 20 vertical flutes, each containing an alignment of crystal tubes filled with stones and carefully placed one on top of the other in a logical sequence. Each stone rises up in a glass tube, like mercury in a thermometer recording a patient's temperature.

The striking monument, which was first presented in Geneva in June, will be on display at Art Basel Miami in the Cartier Salon in the Art Collectors Lounge of the the Miami Beach Convention Center from Dec. 3 to 6 2009.