IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Carpenter brings the high-concept tactility of a sculptor to what many others see as mere structural cladding. The designer got his degree in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and, after he began blowing glass on the side, collaborated with Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based glass artist, on his early conceptual work. In 1971, the two men created a seminal exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Design), a 500-square-foot blown-glass environment of white opaque tubes with argon and neon gas against a background of black vinyl.

While Chihuly went on to create crowd-pleasing blown-glass fantasias, Carpenter became a consultant for the Corning glass company, where he grew passionate about bringing light into the public sphere — while also considering local history. As such, the facade he created for the 320,000-square-foot Nordstrom, which he calls “waveform,” was inspired by the artists’ bay-windowed studios that lined 57th Street at the beginning of the 20th century. Carpenter’s homage to that era is fashioned from 17-foot-tall sections of glass engineered in Italy, made in Germany and molded into shape in Spain (only a handful of ovens in the world are big enough to hold the parabolic double S-curves that span the height of each of the seven floors). Each wave, lined on the inside with a moving metal mesh curtain, forms an occupiable space within the store. Shoppers can navigate around merchandise to peer out down 57th Street, almost to the East River. “It’s important for the store to maintain a relationship to the outside city, which is completely different from the way department stores are built, as a sealed-off refuge,” he says.

But Carpenter still feels a particular connection to the way his creations are viewed from street level. Conscious that big buildings rob the public of an expanse of sky, he makes sure they return something valuable. The Nordstrom facade asserts itself in the cityscape in daring fashion; arguably as far as possible in spirit from the orangy-brick industrial bulwark where the designer works, it makes no less powerful a statement about cosmopolitan life. From the outside, the sculptured glass seems to change radically as you approach because of the folds, which reflect the sky and the skyscrapers against it. Walking down 57th Street toward the wavy confection is like descending a grand staircase: With each step, the whole comes into focus, the image shifting from abstraction to realistic portrait. Standing at the base in daylight, you look up to see a Cubist mirror rendering a city in flux; in the evening, lights glow soft inside, turning the structure transparent, the ballet of shoppers silhouetted in motion. “Yes, it is a store, of course, you are always cognizant of that,” he says, “but that is only part of the story. Ultimately, it’s the story of the city unfolding.”