Piotr Kowalski

Piotr Kowalski was an artist, sculptor, and architect. He was born 2 March 1927, in Poland, and died 7 January 2004 in Paris, France.

Piotr Kowalski worked in non-traditional materials including electronic and mechanical devices, neon art, large earth works, explosions and other natural phenomena including plant growth and gravity. His work often expressed science or natural laws in direct and tangible ways, immediate to the senses.

A refugee of World War II, a graduate of MIT, he immigrated to France as an architect for UNESCO and spent most of the rest of his life in Paris. Along with gallery works, he installed several large outdoors projects.

Piotr Kowalski was born 2 March 1927 in Lviv, then in Poland,now Ukraine. By 1946 he was a refugee of the war living in Brazil. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1952, receiving a Bachelors in Architecture, and maintained relations with MIT throughout his life. He worked as an architect for I. M. Pei from 1952 until 1953, then joined Marcel Breuer as an architect at UNESCO in Paris.

He became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1978, and continued in that position until 1985.

In 1985, he became president of the Ars Technica Association connected to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie uniting philosophers, artists, scientists such as Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, Claude Faure, Jean-Max Albert, Sara Holt, Piero Gilardi, Jean-Claude Mocik, reflecting on the relationship between art and new technologies.

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