The tower of Jesus, a filigree with more than 60,000 unique ceramic pieces

BarcelonaThe trajectory of Ceràmica Cumella is profoundly marked by the legacy of Antoni Gaudí: Toni Cumella (Granollers, 1951) has worked on the restorations of Parc Güell, the Teresianes school, and Casa Batlló. And for almost twenty years he has been working for the Sagrada Família: the tower of Jesus, which Pope Leo XIV inaugurates this Wednesday, is the latest major milestone, shared with his son Guillem, representing the fifth generation of ceramists. Together, father and son have taken on commissions that are only suitable for very expert experts.

"Since we work on unique architectural projects, we have fully accepted the need to develop a specific process to reach the solution, to make an idea possible," states Toni Cumella. "Each project has a part of ingenuity, research, resolution, all of it shared with the Sagrada Família, obviously. Since we never do the same thing, we know how to live with this uncertainty of how we will resolve a project," he adds.

They started talking about the Jesus tower in 2012, four years after they began collaborating with the Sagrada Família Construction Board, and three years after Guillem Cumella joined the family workshop "full-time," as he himself puts it. "From a very young age I was running around the workshop, working there in the summers. And when I was at university, I spent half a day at the faculty and half a day at the workshop," he explains. Thus, the work on the tower, which they have divided between the interior ceramics, done by Toni, and the cross, which Guillem has taken charge of, also reflects their evolution as a workshop.

In parallel to this work, they have done others, such as various Loewe stores in Japan and Korea, the Spanish pavilion at the Osaka Universal Exposition, an intervention at the Natural History Museum in London, and another at the UNED headquarters in Madrid. "We've been lucky not to work 100% for the Sagrada Família, because otherwise, we would have vertigo now," says Cumella. Currently, there are fifteen people in the workshop, the highest ever. And rather than craftsmanship, Toni Cumella prefers to talk about trade: "Modernism was possible thanks to strong trades at the time, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, ceramics, stonemasonry. And I think that in a global world like today, those of us who practice a trade are regaining recognition. For me, trade encompasses more than craftsmanship: tradition, innovation, culture, authenticity, the idiosyncrasy of a country".

endless, 4,000 lines long, one for each piece," he recalls.

They worked with the architect in charge of the cross, Maurici Cortés, with whom they did the color tests and who provided them with the plans to produce the pieces. When they had them ready, they sent them to Germany to be assembled onto the cross's structure. "The cross was a matter of order, because there are many different types of pieces. We were making them arm by arm, fragment by fragment...", explains Guillem. "We used to make endless spreadsheets of 4,000 lines, one for each piece", he recalls.

The generational handover

Meanwhile, Toni was doing the monastic work of enamelling one by one the more than 50,000 triangular pieces of the inner skin of the tower. "Internally, they have gone very well for us, because since I was very busy enamelling these thousands of pieces, it has served me to distance myself a little from the day-to-day work and to make the generational handover with Guillem," says Toni. The deadlines were set by Guillem in agreement with the Sagrada Família. "Guillem exploited me," he jokes.

The size of the pieces is determined by the parabolic shape of the tower. On each level there is the same number of pieces; therefore, on each level they are different. "I worked with some rhombuses where there were about 940 pieces, and when I started enamelling, I couldn't stop because I had to add the colours, and the one below still had to be fresh so they would mix well and have a watercolour effect. That's why the whole has this richness," explains Toni Cumella. The design was done by the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, and it is all an evocation of the Big Bang and the history of the firmament. "The tower starts purple, because after the Big Bang the first element there was was helium, and helium is purple. In the Jesus tower there is science and religion," he says.

Retrospectively, the first job that Ceràmica Cumella did for the Sagrada Família was about 25 monstrances for the nave. They have also done trencadís to restore different parts of the basilica. From now on, it is possible that they could continue working on different parts of the project, such as the roof of the chapel of the Assumption, but nothing is finalized yet.