You’d be hard-pressed to find a time when a multi-story Tiffany stained-glass window doesn’t look stunning. But toss the summer solstice into the mix — when the Earth’s tilt toward the sun is at a maximum and we get the longest day of the year — and the view gets even better. “Our windows are really large, some of the largest in the city, and they really showcase the ingenuity of what the Tiffany Company was trying to do in terms of glass manufacturing,” said David Grinnell, a member of Calvary United Methodist Church on Pittsburgh’s North Side, which will offer free tours every 15 minutes during the June 20 summer solstice.
Louis C. Tiffany, son of Tiffany & Co. founder Charles Louis Tiffany, changed the way stained glass was made in the U.
S. by re-creating medieval techniques and using solid stained glass to create designs, rather than painting details onto a pane of glass. Tiffany had traveled to Europe and taken note of the way scenes were largely painted onto stained glass in its churches.
“He had a notion it could be done better,” Grinnell said. From twisting glass in order to achieve new colors, to unique techniques like tossing glass confetti onto a slab of molten glass and sandwiching up to five layers of glass together, Tiffany innovated and found new ways to create beauty out of the leaded glass. “Tiffany was very interested in how the light hit a window, and so one of the features he exploited was what he called ‘gems’ — he’d take a g.
