Ed Carpenter Arches the 6th Floor Terrace at 150 California

150 California Street
POPOS on the 6th Floor Terrace
Open 9 am to 6 pm

Ed Carpenter is an artist specializing 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. Working internationally from his studio in Portland, Oregon, Carpenter collaborates with a variety of expert consultants, sub-contractors, and studio assistants. He personally oversees every step of each commission, and installs them himself with a crew of long-time helpers.

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. 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.

Carpenter is 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 1970’s

150 California Street is a 22 story office tower in the heart of the downtown San Francisco´s business district. Its sixth floor roof garden provides landscaped outdoor space for the building´s workers. The owner´s unusual challenges to the artist were first to create a sculpture which would disguise and ameliorate a large air vent and diesel exhaust stack emerging into the roof garden, and second that the sculpture should add to the ambience of the garden for its users. Ed Carpenter´s solution to this brief incorporates both the vent and the stack into an arbor-like aluminum and stainless steel tension structure. Integrated into the structure is a network of tension cables supporting laminated dichroic glass details designed to cast delicate projections and reflections of colored light onto surrounding architectural surfaces. The sculpture provides an arching contrast to the surrounding skyscrapers and creates an inviting space beneath its 54´ span for workers on their breaks.

Privately-owned public open spaces (POPOS) are publicly accessible spaces in forms of plazas, terraces, atriums, small parks, and even snippets that are provided and maintained by private developers. In San Francisco, POPOS mostly appear in the Downtown office district area. Prior to 1985, developers provided POPOS under three general circumstances: voluntarily, in exchange for a density bonus, or as a condition of approval. The 1985 Downtown Plan created the first systemic requirements for developers to provide publicly accessible open space.

The Downtown Plan also established the “1% Art Program”.