Carpenter Job

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, USA, 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, except in the case of the largest objects, such as bridges.

While an interest in light has been fundamental to virtually all of Carpenter's work, he also embraces commissions which require new approaches and skills. This openness has led to increasing variety in his commissions and a wide range of sites and materials. He is known as an eager and open-minded collaborator as well as technical innovator. His use of cold bent tempered glass, encapsulated glass elements, programmed artificial lighting, and unusual tension structures has broken new ground in architectural art. Carpenter is grandson of a painter/sculptor, and stepson 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, and now lives with his wife and two children in the Coast Range mountains west of Portland.

As a philosopher he is particularly known for his publication of Civilisation, its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilisation is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilisations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilisation successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud, and Wilfred Trotter who all recognized that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual that can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis, and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia.

Edward Carpenter (29 August 1844 – 28 June 1929) was an English socialist poet, anthologist, early gay activist and socialist philosopher. A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris, E R Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.