JAMES CARPENTER

www.jcdainc.com

risd connection: BFA in Illustration, 1972

talent: Through James Carpenter Design Associates in New York City, this sculptor and visionary has revolutionized the use of glass in architecture.

breaking in: Carpenter first discovered the allure of glass in the early ’70s as Dale Chihuly [RISD MFA ’68, Ceramics] was just getting the RISD Glass Department off the ground. What was great about the program back then was that it was in its “nascent” stage: “There were no facilities, so we built our own furnaces, and no one knew very much about blowing or anything. But it was significant because there were no preconceptions; we discovered the process as we went along.” Carpenter also says that the approach and facilities at RISD — where he started in architecture, then switched to sculpture and glass, and ended up with illustration as his major of record — exposed him to “how to work with and understand materials. There was a great deal of excitement and interchange between the various disciplines.”

getting there: At Corning Glassworks in the early ’70s, Carpenter experimented with emulsions on glass and developed photosensitive glass that responded to ultraviolet light. This exposure to emerging technologies sparked his interest in dichroic glass, which incorporates micro-thin coatings of metallic oxides — a breakthrough adapted from the space industry — to enable glass to simultaneously reflect one wavelength of light and transmit its opposite. “I began to explore how you change and manipulate space through glass and light,” Carpenter says. “I became interested in carrying my ideas forward in the public arena — in a much less preconceived venue than a gallery or museum.”

making it: Since then Carpenter has gone on to earn an international reputation as an indispensable architectural collaborator, a sculptor, inventor, glass evangelist and engineering provocateur. His work is about shaping space through glass, light and architecture, about tricking the “overly aggressive editing device” known as the eye into seeing things differently. Take the gates to the Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia, where his studio created 80-foot masts that exhaled a constant mist and created marvelous mirages by tracking the sun; they used no glass, only subtle manipulation of natural phenomena. Carpenter has also created towering glass walls that are flexible and move like membranes, massive spiral glass staircases, a tower of glass trapezoids held together by cable netting and a six-story blue glass room that appears to float above Berlin when lit at night. He has collaborated with leading architects such as Edward Larrabe Barnes, Norman Foster, Barton Meyers and Richard Meier on everything from airports to courthouses to convention centers, bridges, chapels and private homes. And he’s currently working on two very visible commissions in Lower Manhattan: one for the Consolidated Edison substation across from Ground Zero, the other a busy subway station at Broadway and Fulton Street. In fall 2004 Carpenter received a MacArthur “genius award” of $500,000 in unrestricted funds. Citing both his “fluid and elegant designs” and pursuit of new technologies, the award committee commended the designer for “redefin[ing] our understanding of the power of glass as a means for reshaping light and space.”

discoveries: (1) “We’re not following in anybody’s footsteps; we’re definitely pushing things on the engineering front. It’s risky, but we have a good testing sequence and a flawless track record.” (2) “It’s important that our work is seamlessly integrated into a building, that it’s so integral that you confuse where the art and building meet.”