On December 8, 2021, coinciding with the Immaculate Conception feast, the star that crowns the tower of the Virgin Mary of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was lit for the first time. It was an event that was broadcast to the whole world. The star illuminates the Barcelona sky every day. A star partly manufactured in the Maresme, specifically the 123 glasses by which it is formed. Let’s see.
It was in the year 2007 when David Gibernau, a master glassmaker from Mataró (Maresme), co-owner with his sister of Tot Vidre Gibernau, an artisan company dedicated to carrying out work with glass and mirrors, received a call from the architects of the Sagrada Family. The architects asked him for a series of samples of textured glass to study the possibility that they were the ones who made the glasses for the Star of the Virgin Mary.
That request from 2007 became an order that was created between December 2020 and January 2021. 123 glasses manufactured in a short space of time through a careful process. They are 6-millimeter glass, more or less like the ones we all have in our windows at home, subjected to a texturing process in an oven at 840ºC with two subsequent firings, one to flatten the glass and the other to soften the nuance made in cold. In short, each of the 123 glasses that make up the star has spent more than 60 hours in the oven.
Once this process had been carried out, an industrial treatment was applied in another company to temper them and adhere two other glasses to the front, in order to prevent pieces from falling in the event of breakage.
In an interview published in La Clau, David Gibernau shows his excitement at having participated in such a symbolic company from Mataró:
“It is evident that working to make such an emblematic piece as this entails great responsibility, but also great personal satisfaction. For me it has been a tribute to my father, from whom I learned a lot about what I know about the glass; and also to the artisans who do their work and who rarely know who they are. “
However, this has not been the only collaboration of the company Tot Vidre Gibernau from Mataró with the Sagrada Família. Some time ago, at the request of the architecture department of the Sagrada Familia, it carried out the entire R + D process of what in theory had to be stained glass windows and floral pieces with three dimensions that would fill and complement the work with ceramics by the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo in the tower of Jesus Christ, the highest in the temple. After many meetings, the architects made the decision not to place decorative colored glass and to leave the entire tower with transparent glass.
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