Even today, Carpenter is occasionally categorised as a ‘glass artist’, an appellation that fails him because “Carpenter’s creative route over he past 25 years has moved away from the self-referential domain of artistic glass objects towards a broader agenda and a closer integration with the process of conception and development of architectural design,” as Sandro Marpillero explains in the introduction to his book.
In the three chapters of ‘Environmental Refractions’, Marpillero, himself an architect and lecturer at Harvard University, presents 23 works by the artist. The first chapter, ‘Refractions’, deals with Carpenter’s work with light and glass, a material the artist never used purely because of its transparency.
Carpenter deliberately breaks with the Miesian tradition of the ideal, because entirely transparent glass volume, by using dichroitic, etched or sanded special glass that reflects and refracts light, thus allowing the beholder to experience the sun’s course around the building.
The focus of the second chapter, ‘Constructions’ is the office tower block ‘7 World Trade Center’ in New York completed in the spring of 2006, for which Carpenter, in collaboration with the architects SOM – Skidmore Owings & Merrill, developed the façade and lighting concept. With this project, Marpillero documents the entire design and construction process, illustrating how seamlessly the works of architects, artists (Carpenter and the light artist Jenny Holzer), as well as civil engineers (Schlaich Bergermann und Partner) intertwine.
The third chapter, ‘Apparatuses’, finally presents Carpenter’s early video works and contemporary architectural designs. The common denominator of both is the interaction with the visitor’s kinaesthetic perception. For Tulane University in New Orleans, Carpenter, together with Vincent James Associates Architects and the civil engineers at Transsolar, conceived the conversion of the formerly insulated, artificially air-conditioned university centre into a ‘breathing’, transparent frame structure resembling the traditional porch house. A system of visible and easily understandable shading, cooling and ventilation elements now takes the place of the air-conditioning system, making the building’s reaction to the exterior climate generally comprehensible.
Sandro Marpillero has approached his task as author of ‘Environmental Refractions’ with scientific seriousness. He never considers himself satisfied with mere amazement at the optical effects in Carpenter’s works; he strives always to clarify their structure and function for the reader. His analytical texts are sharp-witted, but only immediately understandable for Carpenter connoisseurs.
The project documentations, which Marpillero and his team have illustrated with numerous diagrams specially re-drawn for this book, are therefore very useful for the novice. With the rather smallscale layout of the book, they make it a very technical textbook-like publication but of high information value.
In view of the major interest of the media, which other frontier runners in architecture, art and civil engineering are currently experiencing, ‘Environmental Refractions’, the first explicit Carpenter monograph, has actually appeared rather late. What makes it particularly delightful is the author’s endeavour to find logic, clarity and traceability, qualities that generally give art and architecture books a half-life extending beyond the present day.