ROSLYN, NEW YORK.- Richard Lippold, a sculptor known for his radiant, expansive abstractions in metal, died on August 22 at a hospital in Roslyn, N.Y., reported The New York Times. He was 87 and lived in Lattingtown, N.Y. Mr. Lippold’s works, in which webs of wires in polished gold and silver hues were punctuated by geometric forms, were often suspended as though hovering in or soaring through cosmic space. Because of the delicate and reflective qualities of his materials, Mr. Lippold’s works seem to dissolve into pure light. His art belongs to a sculptural tradition that began in the early 20th century with Cubism and Constructivism, which shifted focus from the shaping of solid materials to the orchestration of spatial relations among abstract elements. In 1950 the architect Walter Gropius commissioned Mr. Lippold to produced a piece that now stands on the Harvard University campus. Called "World Tree," that open structure of straight and circular metal tubes rises 27 feet, resembling a powerful radio antenna. In 1976 he produced "Ad Astra," a slender, 115-foot-tall double spire bearing starlike wire bursts, for the front of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Born in Milwaukee on May 3, 1915, Mr. Lippold studied industrial design as well as piano and dance at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1937, he set up an industrial-design studio in Milwaukee and did freelance work for Chicago corporations. In 1941 he abandoned design and began teaching art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, inspired by the Constructivist works of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, he began making small, delicate wire constructions in iron, brass and copper. Mr. Lippold first exhibited his sculpture in the group show "Origins of Modern Sculpture" at the City Art Museum in St. Louis in 1945 and had his first solo show in 1947 at the Willard Gallery in New York, where he continued to exhibit periodically until the early 1970’s. In 1952 he was included along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still in the "Fifteen Americans" exhibition organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Dorothy Miller.