Project Overview

Light Veil | Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library

Ed Carpenter was commissioned to create a major sculpture in the 80 feet high main atrium of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. This area is visible from outside of the building as well as from the various floors of the building. The sculpture consists of a monumental inward sloping veil of glass, suspended just inside the east-facing curtain wall. Its overlapping layers create rich textures of transparency, shadow, and color, becoming an almost literal curtain of light. Sunlight passing into the building reflects and transmits throughout the atrium in changing geometric textures and patterns. Dramatic views through the sculpture reward library users on glass-enclosed elevators, a glass-clad exposed staircase, and from all five levels of the building.

About the Artist

Ed Carpenter

Ed Carpenter is an architectural artist based in Portland, OR. He specializes in large-scale public installations ranging from architectural sculpture to infrastructure design. Since 1973, he has completed scores of projects for public, corporate, and ecclesiastical clients. While an interest in light has been fundamental to virtually all of Carpenter’s work, he also embraces commissions that require new approaches and skills. This openness has led to increasing variety in his commissions and a wide range of sites and materials. Recent projects include interior and exterior sculptures, bridges, towers, and gateways. His use of glass in new configurations, programmed artificial lighting, and unusual tension structures have broken new ground in architectural art. He is known as an eager and open-minded collaborator as well as a technical innovator. Carpenter is the grandson of a painter/sculptor, and step-son of an architect, in whose office he worked summers as a teenager. He studied architectural glass art under artists in England and Germany during the early 1970s.

He studied architectural glass design in England and in Germany through the support of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts.  Since beginning his career in 1973, he has completed more than forty large scale collaborative art commissions in public buildings around the U.S. and Japan. Carpenter describes his work as a public artist by saying that he strives to create atmospheric and emotional conditions that can make a site even more suited for its intended purpose than it otherwise would be.