2006年VOA标准英语-An Architecture of Glass That Filters Sunl

By Carolyn Weaver 1
New York City
28 February 2006
 
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New technologies have made glass, that ancient, fragile material made from molten sand, suitable as an architectural building block, too. New York architect and glass artist James Carpenter is the best-known innovator 2 in the field, work for which he received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 2004.

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Architect James Carpenter, with his design for New York’s new Moynihan Station  
  

"Light is really the subject that most interests me,” says James Carpenter, “and glass is the material that allows you to explore and control and manipulate qualities of light." Carpenter began his career as an architecture student, then veered 3 off into glass art and technology, and then back into what you might call “glass architecture.”

In the last twenty years, partly due to Carpenter's innovations, strong new forms of glass have been developed that can be used as a structural 4 material, whether for staircases, walkways or walls -- transparent 5 walls that admit sunlight, but are coated invisibly to keep out too much heat.
 
 
“Jazz at Lincoln Center” performance space, Time-Warner Center (Brad Feinknopf, courtesy JCDAINC)  
  
"Most people find this fairly hard to believe,” Carpenter says, “but glass in many respects is much stronger than steel. I mean, we have this presumption 6 about glass as being very fragile, and it breaks, and those are all true. But if you use it correctly, in compression, and use it in specific ways, it really does have a strength that's much greater than steel.”

For example, new forms of "safety" laminated glass can be laced together on cables, creating flexible walls that can absorb the impact of hurricane winds or blast forces, almost as a tennis racket absorbs the impact of a ball. As Carpenter puts it, "You take the energy and allow the structure to deform 7 slightly, and then re-find its original position." 

These tennis-racket walls are used both in Carpenter's glass atrium at the Time-Warner Center in New York, and at the new Seven World Trade Center, the first Ground Zero skyscraper 8 to be rebuilt -- set to open in April -- to which Carpenter contributed the facade 9 and base.

James Carpenter, with his model for a subway station’s “sundial” dome 10  
  
You can see other James Carpenter works in cities around the United States, and in other countries, including Germany, China and Saudi Arabia. But his most high-profile projects are in his home base of New York City. For the roof of a new subway station in Manhattan, he's designed a glass-enclosed perforated metal dome. He shows a model of the design to a visitor to his firm’s offices in an old industrial building downtown.

“This form that I'm holding is a sort of very delicate, diaphanous 11 metal structure that floats inside that glass volume,” Carpenter says, “and the purpose is to take daylight coming down through this oculus or skylight at the roof, passing through, and then hitting the metal skin, the light then is reflected further down into the subway station. So, if you walked through this space every day, you would begin to realize that when you looked up at it and saw the sun shining in, you could effectively tell what time of year it is. It’s a kind of sun dial."

Last spring, Carpenter's firm, James Carpenter Design Associates, won a competition to design New York City's new Moynihan Station, an expansion of a current railway hub, Pennsylvania Station. It will be located across Eighth Avenue in a 100-year-old landmark 12 neoclassical-style building that Carpenter's plan leaves largely untouched, he says, “to avoid doing anything to the original fabric 13, but to have a glass roof that floats over the building and around the outside.” 

Carpenter’s “Dichroic Light Field,” Columbus Avenue, New York  
  
Standing 14 next to a large model of the design, Carpenter points to the re-opened “moats” and other openings that will carry light down to the shops and train tracks underground. “We’re trying to use elements of light to organize the space, and to provide a means of orienting yourself as you go through the space,” he says.

Adding nuance 15 and beauty to everyday experiences -- walking through a subway station or along a city street -- is the purpose of his experiments with light and glass, Carpenter says.

Further north in Manhattan, a massive flat glass sculpture by Carpenter shimmers 16 on a brick wall overlooking Columbus Avenue.  It looks like a huge window, but that’s actually reflective glass hung on a blank wall, with short projecting "fins 17" of dichroic glass coated to divide the visible spectrum 18 of light – so that the colors shift as you walk by, and as the sun passes overhead.