Q&A: Neri Oxman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Built Environment

Neri Oxman comes about as close to being a rock star as a designer, architect, and scientist can. She once designed a 3D-printed mask for Icelandic musician Björk, who performed in it. Her 2015 TED Talk on design at the intersection of biology and technology has garnered millions of views. When paparazzi started hanging around her MIT lab due to rumors about her friendship with fellow architecture lover Brad Pitt, Oxman used the opportunity to spotlight science, carrying around a copy of The Feynman Lectures on Physics and a duplicate pressing of one of the Golden Records—phonograph discs containing sounds and images from earth that were sent aboard the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977.

When she’s not in the public eye, Oxman is with her lab at MIT, the Mediated Matter Group, furthering her design philosophy of material ecology: a field of study that blends computational design, synthetic biology, and digital fabrication. Since 2010, she’s been creating new material systems that harmonize with—and deftly imitate—building blocks of the natural world.

It’s all brought to light in Nature x Humanity: Oxman Architects, a retrospective spanning from 2007 to the present that’s now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Herein, Oxman views nature as a co-client: The 40 or so artworks and installations in the show include a model of her Biodiversity Pavilion in Cape Town, a melanin-infused structure that protects against ultraviolet rays; the Aguahoja pavilions, vertical structures made with shrimp shells, apple skins, and fallen leaves that, once completely decayed, will nourish the soil where they stand; The Wanderers series, a set of glass tops designed to respond to extreme environments on different planets; and The Future of Mannahatta, four models that show a 400-year time lapse of a biomass consuming and rewilding New York City.

We spoke with Oxman about how innovation is possible when we suspend our disbelief, her use of ancient materials like melanin, what it means for a building to decompose, and how all of this coalesces as a new trajectory for how we approach the built environment.

What does it mean to say that nature is a co-client? What does "design-inspired nature" mean as opposed to nature-inspired design?

The onset of the Industrial Revolution is considered the most important moment in the history of humanity since the domestication of plants and animals. Ever since, we’ve been creating a rupture between humankind and nature. And that divide has been instigated by products of our creation: wearables, tools, buildings, and cities.

All of these and more compose what is known as anthropomass—the mass that is created by humankind by technological means. A study by the Weizmann Institute shows that in 2020, that mass exceeded the biomass on our planet, which means that there are now more phones than bones buried in the earth [sic]. The technosphere has taken over the biosphere. This is a very critical moment in time. We must reorient ourselves with the natural environment, or else perish.

Can we envision a landscape of many businesses and companies that really question the lineage of mass manufacturing and systemization, from the Industrial Revolution all the way to renewable energies? Could we be designing or spinning wearables out of silkworm-made silk, but allow the silkworms to metamorphosize healthily instead of being exterminated? That’s just one example.