Antony Gormley is not an architect, but he uses the medium of architecture to broaden the power of art. Over the past 20 years, his projects have situated the human figure in unlikely urban and rural spaces. In his latest major work, Blind Light, a 28-ft. cube is a space where visual perception is almost obliterated.

The very title "Blind Light" (which he showed at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Manhattan last year) states a paradox. A cube with transparent walls, it encloses an area that is filled with a dense, smoke-like fog. The effect is that you can't see more than a few inches in front of you. A white cube becomes a black hole.

In architecture, the point of the glass cube used to be transparent. It was the goal of classic modernist works like Philip Johnson's Glass House, which led to thousands of imitations. In Blind Light, those who step inside are in the equivalent of a whiteout, the phenomenon experienced in arctic climates when light shines in such an intense way as to make anything or any sense of perspective disappear.

When you stand outside of the box and look in through its transparent walls, the effect is different. From time to time, you see the hint of hands, heads, and bodies on the other side. Figures are no more than silhouettes, if that. Every hand is the same, as is every figure, like Gormley's arrangements of metal casts of his own body that are in Yorkshire, England, Australia, and China.

Gormley had even grander architectural ambitions for Blind Light when he first installed it at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2007. Architecture would be turned into sculpture. He says, "It's as if I'm taking the building as any lump of clay, and I'm investigating what its capabilities are and how it can be pushed and pulled into something that has meaning." It was his meaning, of course.

There is something conceptual about Gormley undertaking such a project. Architecture is called sculptural when it is distinguished by its profile. Obvious examples would be buildings by Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind. With Blind Light, a sculptor is making a basic enclosure, a cube, which is defined not by its shape, and not even the nature of its space, but by the experience created by the sculptor to make everything in the space visually imperceptible.

Gormley's sculpture has always had an architectural dimension to it and a focus on the human figure in space. Born in 1950, he began in the 1970s by draping bodies (friends of his who agreed to be models) in castings of plaster to create ghost-like forms that resembled the sleeping bodies he saw in India when he traveled there after finishing art school.These bodies outside of architecture were the first sculptures that Gormley made.

Later he turned to his own tall, slim body, which he molded and set in casts of lead. Placing hundreds on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool, and in the desert of western Australia, he forced viewers to examine their notions of proportion and perspective, standing motionless as light and weather change, and as the Crosby Beach tides go in and out. The figures are identical, yet monumental, evoking ordinary people who lived in these places for thousands of years and never left their imprint on the history that was written.

In another set of sculptures, the Block Works series, Gormley constructed realistically proportioned figures (once again, molded from his own body) of elements that looked like children's blocks. He used larger modules to create Space Station, an amalgamation of metal cubes of various sizes, which he exhibited on its side. Was it an artist's response to the slanting angles that we know in the architecture of Gehry and Libeskind?

Architectural as his sculpture is, Gormley is an artist who uses architecture. He has no client, and there is nothing functional about the work. His architecture, or constructed space, is another medium to dazzle, to entertain, or to confuse you as you explore it.

For Gormley, a sculpture isn't just an object, but a teaching device. He has said that he wants sculpture to be a still point in the moving world where people can sense their own lives against a thing that doesn't move. In Blind Light, he forces people to move within his cube as they discover the limits to what, in a white cloud, seems to be infinite space. And what is art if not reaching for the infinite?

David D'Arcy is a correspondent for The Art Newspaper (London) and a contributing editor at Art + Auction. He is also a regular contributor to The Architects Newspaper.