Charles Owen Perry was born on Oct. 18, 1929, in Helena, Mont., where his father owned a successful gold and gem mine.  He served in the Army as a forward observer with an artillery unit in Korea, where he was awarded a bronze star for bravery and invented his own gun sight out of scrap parts to achieve better depth perception.  After returning to the United States, he enrolled in the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, earning a master’s degree in architecture in 1958.  At the suggestion of the painter Josef Albers, he experimented with a variety of materials in a quest to discover their inner nature. In so doing, he became interested in the rhombus and invented plastic rhombic hexahedrons that interlocked to form novel shapes. These were later exhibited as art at the 1969 Spoleto Festival in Italy and, under the name Perrygons, sold as construction toys through the Museum of Modern Art.  The artistic possibilities of geometric forms, and the mysteries of the universe’s physical laws, provided Mr. Perry with an inexhaustible source of material. The Möbius strip reappeared in the sculptures “Calligraphic Möbius” and “Helix Möbius Mace,” both in the Crystal City development in Arlington, Va.; “Continuum II” at the Marina Center Holdings Building in Singapore; and “Solstice,” at the Bank of America Building in Tampa, Fla., an assemblage of silver pipes described on its base as “a two-thirds twist triangular torus Möbius.”  Mr. Perry explored other shapes in “Shell Mace” (Shell Oil Company, Melbourne), the bright-red, calligraphic “Rondo” (Kinshicho Station, Tokyo) and “Eclipse” (Hyatt Regency, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco), a gold-colored sphere — technically a pentagonal dodecahedron with the faces spiraling outward — composed of 1,440 pieces of gold-colored, interlacing aluminum tubes.  Mr. Perry also designed gold and silver jewelry for Tiffany & Company, a semi-abstract chess set made of nickel-plated tubing, and sculptural puzzles. In the early 1990s he designed several chairs: an ergonomic stacking chair, known as the Perry Chair, for Krueger International; the Uno office chair for Steelcase; and the Virtuoso for Virco.  In addition to his son Marco, of Brooklyn, he is survived by his wife, Sheila Henry de Perry; a brother, Alexander, known as Sandy, of St. Marys, Ga.; a sister, Avery Wall of Omaha; three other sons: Paul, of Lexington, Mass., Carlo, of Brooklyn, and Pat, of Yardley, Pa.; and nine grandchildren.  A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2011, on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Charles Perry, 81, Sculptor Of Intricate Swirls and Twirls. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Perry created “Continuum,” the knotted black Möbius strip in front of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, among many other works.