James Carpenter talks about glass as a compression material. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 04:14.

James Carpenter: Well, I think that’s it. Yeah. I think glass always is a little bit—or unfortunately characterized for one characteristic, you know, just its potential fragility, ease of breakage, all that, on the other hand glass is remarkably strong, you  know, in certain conditions, particularly compression and, you know, glass is in fact, stronger than steel, you know, in compression conditions. I think a lot of that [inaudible] is going back to, you know, talking about working in Corning and some other things, just learning about glass and material. We, one of the biggest things we worked on over the last 25 or 30 years is on the structural use of glass where you actually deploy the glass as a contributing member of a larger structure and system. And that really just was not something that was being done by anybody. You know, today, you see, I mean, actually we did the very earliest [inaudible—according to Ben Coleman, JC is talking about JCDA using glass structurally for stairs and other things long before Apple] stairs and stuff like that, but now you sort of see it around and it’s become sort of a signature. But that’s the, that’s—and I think that, that’s the, I think that that’s, that’s a very interesting thing because it confounds people that what, what they perceive as being very fragile and potentially dangerous, and all those things can in fact be remarkably safe, and not a problem at all. So in Tower 7, I think, I think maybe what you’re referring to is the blast wall at the front of the building? And that’s a little bit of another example of some of the stuff we did in structures. That’s a detail where we’ve done a lot of these big cable wall systems in Germany and Columbus Circle is one, one year, that’s the one at Hudson Yards is a cable system too. There—and the, the reason I got involved in those early on like, early nineties, is that I’ve always been interested in the qualities of the glass itself. And this is coming back to what I said about reflective images of the surface or what’s behind it or what you’re doing inside the class. The information that’s resident on the glass or within the class is very subtle and can be very easily overlooked. And a lot of times structure using glass, it’s either going to be a heavy frame to hold the glass like on a building or curtain wall, or you might be aware of a lot of these other structural systems which have big cable trusses and the glass is basically held by point fixings on these big cable structures. Well, all of those systems are assuming the glass has no strength, therefore, you have to have this really robust structure around it to hold it. And the glass is just going along for the ride. And what we’ve tried to do over the last 30 years is minimize the actual visual apparent presence of structure just with simple cable, and you’re actually letting the glass work and the glass becomes a participant in the structure and in that cable wall at the 7, that dynamic is obviously a very sort of instantaneous load and the wall will move with roughly three feet. So what we’ve done is in the, where the cables cross each other, each fitting embedded in the glass with this material that we’ve worked on developing the glass is actually allowed to slide and come back into the fitting. So the glass would actually, you know, silicone joints have great elasticity to them. That’s the great strength of glass so in the joint you have conventional silicone joint, but at the corners it actually is allowed to slip and come back. So the whole wall can actually distort all the panels, move away from each other, you know, three-dimensionally. And then it come in and go the other way, which is obviously the reciprocal [inaudible.]. So anyway, that was always—and then the principle, the reason I sort of got involved in that is like you want the glass to always be predominant. That’s what you want people to focus on. And then just not, not contradicting what I said about not to look at the object, but it’s, it’s, you want the subtlety to be available for interpretation or recognition.