From the early stages of his career, Tom Patti has worked with a vocabulary in art that enhances and exists in architecture. He studied Industrial Design and Architectural Theory. His design studies, combined with a fine art background, led to the involvement with E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), a project co-founded by Robert Rauschenberg to promote collaboration between artists and engineers. Developing experimental building systems that incorporated new technologies, Tom explored the properties of formable transparent materials for architectural work. They evolved into his original use of fusing and laminating commercial glass and plastics.

Commissioned by General Electric in 1982, Tom created the first large, laminated and thermo-formed plastic sculpture for the company’s Plastics Division headquartered in Massachusetts, Tom’s Genic Doran Divider Sentinel took two years to complete and required the collaboration of GE scientists and engineers worldwide. The work remains the largest completed one of its kind. The sculpture is now in the collection of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX.

While Patti is best known for his exquisite small-scale forms, over the past decades he has also collaborated with renowned architects on site-specific, architectural scale installations and commissions. Examples of these projects include Patti’s 1994-97 collaboration with architect Cesar Pelli on various parts of the Owens Corning Headquarters in Toledo, OH, the 1998 forty-foot monumental glass passage developed for the carriageway entrance to the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, North Carolina. Spectral Gateway, a doorway entrance leading into the 1997 exhibition Glass Today, featured at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a sculptural lite from the six-panel commission for the University of North Carolina Law School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, completed in 1999 are other examples of Patti’s works for architecture.

Tom Patti’s keen intellect, unwavering commitment to exploration, and dedication to living and creating with advanced technologically current materials have produced an unparalleled body of work. His design philosophy is described in his own words: “The role of the artist is to test thinking against new materials. The challenge for me for the past 30 years has been to investigate the relationship between art and science, and explore humanity’s response to a world of changing social and technological needs. My work with high performance glass addresses issues of security and safety through the applied arts. It represents a commitment to bringing art and science together. It is tangible evidence of something that separates humankind from all other life forms, that magnificent gift that allows us to dream, question, conceptualize and create—the human mind.”