Glass ceilings, sailing bridges

Insight on the News, March 27, 1995 by Karen S. Chambers

We're outside of the fine arts. We're outside of engineering. We're outside of architecture. We're actually in the middle of all three," says the lanky James Fraser Carpenter, known as Jamie to his friends.

James Carpenter Design Associates has consulted with world-class architects such as I.M. Pei, Norman Foster and Barton Myers on state-of-the-art glass technology. The firm has made sculptures using ice and neon with Dale Chihuly, arguably the best-known glass artist, and its designers even have tried their hands at experimental film.

In recent years, projects such as Spectral Light Dome, a 30-foot cap for the Performing Arts Center in Portland, Ore., and Tension Net Sculpture, a 100-by-12-foot glass and metal "airship" hovering above a plaza at the Southern California Gas Company in Los Angeles, have helped to establish Carpenter as the man to call for sleek, intelligent sculptures that relate well to their surroundings -- neither too aggressive nor too polite.

But Carpenter is not interested in making just sculpture. Although his works are art -- "objects to enliven space" -- they are also about engineering and "spatial implications." Carpenter indeed is difficult to classify, but one factor has been consistent: His material of choice for nearly 2S years has been glass.

"Glass is typically always framed-in or leaded," says Carpenter. His goal is to liberate glass so that it's components "are really floating and almost unobstructed in their presentation." In his most recent works, he has reduced the hardware necessary to support the glass to a minimum and pioneered the use of glass as a structural element.

Carpenter doesn't see much difference between a glass table and a glass bridge. The smaller works allow him to understand structure minimizing materials and maximizing strength Once those concepts are mastered, he says, you can "approach things on any scale.... You can do something that is 10 feet long, and you can do something that's 1,400 feet long."

In the 1980s, Carpenter became more and more involved with engineered glass sculptures intended for architectural sites, but he always viewed them as research for larger projects. Some of the works were "purchased as sculpture, but for us they're really experiments; they're really opportunities to explore structure and materials"

Although Carpenter has made purely speculative proposals, such as the "museum/house" designed with his wife, architect Toshiko Mori, his first real architectural effort has been the Wabasha Street Bridge in St. Paul, Minn. He characterizes the project, now more than four years old, as both frustrating and satisfying. "We came up with some pretty good thinking on a project of that scale that broke some new ground and ... allowed people to see their environment in a very different way." Unfortunately for Carpenter, inadequate fund-raising and public criticism of the radical nature of the bridge, which Tad Simons of the Twin Cities Reader said could be the "first great bridge of the 21st century," have slowed work.

Carpenter originally proposed a V-masted, cable-stayed structure that St. Paulites christened "the sailboat bridge" because the triangular fan of support cables would make it look like a large schooner. Critics have charged that the modernistic nature of Carpenter's design is out of keeping with the 19th-century character of the city, while supporters have hoped it could offer a new vision for St. Paul. The project since has been rethought. Though fund-raising continues, the city is seeking a less expensive span across the Mississippi. Carpenter has designed another bridge without twin masts; for this, he has designed a central accessway made of luminous materials.