In 1917, shortly after Einstein had announced his master equation for general relativity, H. Weyl characterized the Schwarzschild metric, which is the first nontrivial solution to the Einstein equation, by a harmonic function. Since then, the solutions to the Einstein equation with a certain set of symmetries are identified with elliptic variational problems, in particular the harmonic map equation. With Marcus Khuri, Gilbert Weinstein and Martin Reiris, we have constructed a new set of stationary solutions to the higher dimensional vacuum Einstein equations, which contains non-spherical event horizons, as well as gravitational solitons, which contains no blackholes, yet geometrically nontrivial.