On Tuesday, December 12th, James Carpenter visited SOM’s San Francisco office to deliver a lecture titled “Light in the Public Realm.” Carpenter is the founder of the cross-disciplinary design studio James Carpenter Design Associates. ?During his lecture, he discussed a selection of projects, including those at the Time Warner Center, Fulton Center, and the Frost Amphitheater, and provided insight on his distinctive use of natural light and glass.
SOM and Carpenter have had a longstanding collaborative history, beginning in the 1980s with a series of glass window installations at Baltimore’s Penn Station. The station was part of the larger Eastern Corridor Amtrak Improvement Program in which SOM played a central role. Carpenter’s firm has since worked on multiple projects with SOM, including San Francisco International Airport, 7 World Trade Center, and Time Warner Center. SOM’s design for Carpenter’s Hope Tower, a 120-foot-tall artwork at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, is included in the exhibition “SOM: Engineering x [Art + Architecture].”
Since founding his firm in 1979, Carpenter has been recognized with a multitude of national and international awards, including an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Smithsonian National Environment Design Award.