Mr. Carpenter, who was born in Washington and raised in New England, planned to study architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he enrolled in 1968. But he was drawn to the sculpture studio, and particularly to the glass artist Dale Chihuly, who was then teaching at the school. From 1969 to 1974 the two men collaborated on a series of sculptures, including some with neon lights inside, that bear little resemblance to the wild and colorful blown-glass works for which Mr. Chihuly later became famous. After graduating with a degree in sculpture in 1972, he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a decade as a consultant to Corning Glass. He also continued making sculptures, which in the 1980s brought him to the attention of the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Mr. Barnes was looking for a large-scale artwork for the plaza of his IBM building, then going up at 57th Street and Madison Avenue. Toshiko Mori, an architect at the Barnes office, interviewed Mr. Carpenter. Though he didn’t get the job, he ended up marrying Ms. Mori, now a Harvard architecture professor known for her careful additions to buildings by Paul Rudolph and other 20th-century masters. Though he plans to continue working as a consultant to architects, Mr. Carpenter said, he is also doing more and more projects on his own. (In 2004 he won a MacArthur “genius” grant; the $500,000 award he said, has allowed him to try out ideas even when there were no clients to finance them.)