From 1972 through 1978, Chihuly and Carpenter directed their collaborative efforts toward making glass doors and windows that were amalgams of sculpture and craft defying categorization. Function was secondary both to design and the expansion of the artistic possibilities of the medium of glass. This aspect of their work allowed Chihuly to pursue an interest in interior design and Carpenter to work with architecture. They mixed blown, cast, assembled, and mosaic glass for these pieces and used writing and linear drawings to animate some of their surfaces, but their most interesting designs for doors and windows were non-pictorial and composed of geometric shapes.

Rondel Door, their first project in this series, was completed for the 1972 American Glass Now. The door's decoration and permanence were decidedly opposite to the austere, transient installation of Dry Ice, Bent Glass, and Neon that also represented them. The door consisted of four blown rondels set with beveled plate glass in a unique lead came matrix. The caming, a grooved bar of lead used to hold together glass sections, was fabricated for them by Michael Kennedy, a Providence craftsman who now lives in Seattle.

With its distinctive raised swirls of color and linear arabesques, the door was an homage to both Art Nouveau and high-impact 1960s design. Of the two American Glass Now projects, it was the door, not the installation piece, that was illustrated in a Newsweek review (April 9, 1973) of the Toledo survey and brought the new glass movement to the attention of a broad public. Rondel Door was reserved for purchase by the Corning Museum but was damaged in transit from one of the survey's final stops. It was returned to the artists and then restored nearly twenty years later when Kennedy found another blown bull's-eye section that had been made in 1972.

After the exhibition, Chihuly and Carpenter received several commissions: a glass open wall insert for the Corning Glass Museum [Corning Wall]; a richly embellished and collaged window for the crafts division of the Australian Arts Council; and unique doors for John and Anne Gould Hauberg's Pacific Northwest Arts Center and the Pfannebecker Collection [Pfannebecker Door].

In an interview with Seaver Leslie, first published in the March 1975 RISD Alumni Bulletin and later reprinted in the August 1975 issue of Glass Art Magazine, Chihuly noted, "My concern is not with a limited audience, especially the gallery audience, which is too specialized for my present interests. I like to deal with the crowds off the streets who enter public buildings. It's a tremendous challenge and joy to get them involved in looking-to hold their attention."

This early commitment of Chihuly and Carpenter to decorative and functional art anticipated important changes that would take place in the art world over the next two decades. As Chihuly commented in the same interview, "We're going to see more and more artists turning towards decorative arts-particularly architectural arts. People are involved in making their own indigenous and personal places to live-they're sick of ready-made suburbia. And, now that cities are making it compulsory that one percent of a public building's cost goes towards art, I think that we will soon see some fresh approaches to architectural and decorative arts."

These architectural projects were the last series that Chihuly and Carpenter pursued together. Their collaboration was the most sustained and formal of Chihuly's career, though both artists have continued to work with architecture, and Chihuly has completed numerous large-scale commissions since the early 1980s. The concerns they articulated in the mid-1970s are still among the governing principles of their art. Though living on opposite coasts, they have maintained a friendship and periodically speak of collaborating again.

Dale Chihuly: Installations 1964-1992 by Patterson Sims