CRICURSA

In the 21st century, design can no longer be understood as simply an interesting chair or sophisticated typography. It must be taken as a medium. Design is the potential to improve that which surrounds us. And it is that particular quality which best describes the work of Cricursa, a company which has spent the last 85 years researching the potential of glass in transforming first objects, then buildings and now cities. Alejandro Sasplugas Moré and Fernando Figuerola Tutusaus founded the company in 1928. Barcelona was, at that time, preparing to welcome the world’s fair, for which Mies van der Rohe would create his legendary pavilion. Cricursa’s first job took place very near to that icon of the modern world: the glass of the lamps at the Montjuïc fountains. After the war, curved shop windows would appear and later still, in the final years of the dictatorship, mercury would be used to tint a new range of glass in order to create mirrors and spheres for outdoor decorations. At that time, a new generation of Sasplugas and Figuerolas (Alejandro and Fernando again) had taken control of the company. Research into glass was overcoming difficulties and opening new doors. In 1978, with the introduction of democracy, a new generation of managers bought a machine for laminating curved glass. Laminated or vacuum laminated, curved tempered or annealed glass started to be created from the catalogue of a company which, if already ambitious before, was now even more motivated with the idea of making real progress. Later still, we would see the arrival of bulletproof and solar control glass, ovens used to create curved, energy efficient glass, and finally, a chamber for hydrophobic treatment, strange names for those essential inventions which were products of years of research.