Saint-Joseph School
Translating stained glass into bricks means translating light into pixels. The drawing survives, as long as you accept that every piece counts.
2.2 mtall, after a window
- Client
- Saint-Joseph School
- Sector
- Schools
- Location
- Dardilly, France
- Date
- 2021
- Occasion
- The school's patronal feast
- Size
- 2.2 × 1.6 m
- Source
- A window in the school
- Now
- The school's entrance area
Marking the patronal feast with something more than a service.
The school wanted to mark Saint Joseph's day with a project involving every pupil, not just a mass and a snack. The subject was given: Saint Joseph holding the Child and the lily.
The difficulty is the source. Stained glass works through transparency and gradients of light; a brick only knows flat colour, and a finite number of them.
A window translated into flat colour, panel by panel.
We took the school's own window and turned it into a laying plan: 2.2 metres tall by 1.6, in the reds, golds and blues the palette allows. Where glass grades, brick cuts — and the drawing reads better from a distance for it.
The work was cut into panels shared between classes. Each child works on a few square centimetres, with their plan, without seeing what they are building.
The final assembly happened in front of everyone, panel by panel, until the face appeared.
Hanging in the entrance area.
The panel hangs in the school's entrance area, the first wall families see on the way in. The pupils who built it in 2021 still point it out to new arrivals.
You have a strong image and three hundred pupils.
A window, a crest, a photograph, a mural: send us the image and the numbers and we'll tell you what's feasible and in how many sessions.