Archinect - News

Neri Oxman announces formation of OXMAN research practice in NYC

2024-09-27T15:41:00-04:00

Neri Oxman, the former MIT professor and winner of the 2018 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, has launched a new operation called OXMAN and based in New York City.

Promising a "radical new species of design practice," Oxman, who is collaborating with Foster + Partners on the realization of its 36,000-square-foot space on 11th Avenue in Manhattan, described it as a "design and innovation company that creates new technologies, products, and environments across a range of scales and applications, from the molecular to the urban scale."

Image: courtesy of OXMAN

Initiatives will be pursued in three main project areas and their corresponding platforms. Throughout, a press announcement for OXMAN states, the project will advocate for "synergy between biology and technology, moving towards products and buildings that are designed for the immediate and long-term well-being of human civilization and the natural world."

Photo: Nicholas Calcott, Courtesy of OXMAN

The first, Oo (pronounced 'O-Ze...

Netflix's Abstract Season 2 to profile Olafur Eliasson & Neri Oxman

2019-09-18T15:30:00-04:00

The new season of Abstract will launch globally on September 25th. The subjects featured in season 2 include:

Olafur Eliasson - the Icelandic-Danish artist known for his large scale immersive installations. He has used light, architecture, ecology, and digital design to challenge the assumptions many of us make about design and perception.

Neri Oxman - the Israeli-born artist, bio-sciences pioneer, architect, and MIT professor. She is known for her masterful ability to combine art and science in her creations.

Also featured will be toy designer Cas Holman, product designer Ian Spalter, and typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler.

Robots will be in charge of the design, manufacturing, and construction of the upcoming Seoul Robot Science Museum

2019-02-21T12:36:00-05:00

Turkish based architecture studio Melike Altinisik Architects (MAA) wins the first ever international design competition hosted by The Seoul Metropolitan Government. The first competition of its kind, applicants were asked to submit a design idea to pioneer the world's first robot science museum. The technology for robots to design the built environment is not new to the architecture and design community. However, what makes this competition win so different is the level of autonomy the robots are given and robotic construction techniques used. According to MAA's principal Melike Altinisik, "the new robot science museum which plays a catalytic role in advancing and promoting science, technology, and innovation throughout society is not only going to exhibit robots but actually from design, manufacturing to construction and services robots will be in charge."

Robot Science Museum in Seoul, Korea. Design by MAA MELIKE ALTINISIK ARCHITECTS Visualization by Ediz Akyalçın

During the mus...

The future of couture is a blend of fashion, technology, and architecture

2018-12-28T14:27:00-05:00

Technology and innovation are an important part of this, but nature is my source of inspiration. That can not be otherwise, because I work for the body. Many people see nature and technology as two very different things, but I see technology as a simplified version of biological processes.

Haute couture made its debut in 1858 with Charles Frederick Worth's iconic House of Worth. Since then fashion's historical timeline has influenced architects and designers in numerous ways. Fast forward to 2018, this relationship with architects has not faded. Zaha Hadid and Neri Oxman, for example, have used fashion as another element to display methods of architectural practice. With the evolution of the 3D printer, creating mesmerizing shapes and forms has allowed for the possibilities of fashion to transform into something more than just a pretty dress.

Wanderers: Biologically-augmented 3D printed wearables ©Neri Oxman | Behance & Shoes by Zaha Hadid for United Nude Image © Zaha Hadid Architects

Acclaimed Dutch designer, Iris Van Herpen, blends fashion, science, and technology to create rhythmically stunning works. High fashion and the art of 3D fabrication is becoming more and more prevalent on the runway, and Van Herpen's Syntopia is no exception. In collaboration with Studio D...

Construction robots spooling fiberglass filament unveiled by MIT's Mediated Matter Group

2018-10-12T15:00:00-04:00

MIT's Mediated Matter Group has developed a construction robot that winds fiberglass filament into large structures. The research studio, led by Neri Oxman, has dubbed the little machines, Fiberbots, and hopes they can one-day be used to build complicated, large-scale structures.

Credit: The Mediated Matter Group

The way it works is that each Fiberbot is connected to a tank containing fiber and resin. The winding arm sucks the mixture, spins it around the Fiberbot's body, and then uses ultra-violet light to solidify the grown portion. Once hardened, the Fiberbot uses its base to climb up the hardened segment where it then repeats the process. The result is an organically shaped, three-dimensional structure that can climb as high as 15 feet tall.

The robots can angle themselves and change directions in order to complete complex shapes. Mediated Matter also developed a complimenting design system that allows designers to create parameters that govern its shape without having to prov...

Neri Oxman: Architecture's modern day Wonder Woman

2018-10-08T16:08:00-04:00

What makes Dr. Oxman, the scientist, so unusual, said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, is her aesthetic sense. “She’s not afraid of formal elegance,” Ms. Antonelli said. “The reason why she is a gift to the field of architecture and design is that her science works, her aesthetics work, and her theory works.

Tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Dr. Neri Oxman's larger than life approach to architecture and design has continuously turned heads. Her impact in the world of architecture has led her to various breakthroughs in understanding the relationship and possibility between nature and the built environment.

Water based digital fabrication ©Neri Oxman | Behance

Coining the term, material ecology, Dr. Oxman and her motley crew at MIT has turned MIT's Media Lab into a fantastically eccentric playground. Through digital fabrication, synthetic design, and computational design Dr. Oxman and her team have developed amazingly beautiful and technically provocative multifunctional structures you would find in a science fiction novel.

Water based digital fabrication ©Neri Oxman | Behance

According to Dr. Oxman, "we treat design more like a gardening practice." The use of organic materials like ground up shrimp shells and silkworms are the natural stars in h...

Architecture's Page Six moment: Brad Pitt hangs out with American-Israeli architect and MIT professor Neri Oxman

2018-04-05T17:04:00-04:00

A source exclusively confirms that architecture and design aficionado Pitt recently met accomplished Oxman through an MIT architecture project and they have since become friends. Pitt was referred to Oxman to collaborate on an architectural project he was working on, we’re told. As first revealed on “Page Six TV,” a source told us, “Brad and Neri instantly hit it off because they share the same passion for architecture, design and art. This is best described as a professional friendship.”

MIT is developing 3D-printing technology capable of making a basic building structure

2017-05-11T12:45:00-04:00

The list of materials that can be produced by 3-D printing has grown to include not just plastics but also metal, glass, and even food. Now, MIT researchers are expanding the list further, with the design of a system that can 3-D print the basic structure of an entire building.

According to the researchers, structures built with this tech will be faster to make and cheaper than traditional construction. They'll be customizable and enable forms otherwise difficult to manufacture. "Even the internal structure could be modified in new ways," they write, "different materials could be incorporated as the process goes along, and material density could be varied to provide optimum combinations of strength, insulation, or other properties."

The process involves using a large, industrial robotic arm with a smaller, precision-motion robotic arm attached on a movable track. The highly controllable arm can work as a traditional construction nozzle, pouring concrete or spraying insulation, or be used for digital fabrication with something like a milling head.

The system is different than other large 3-D printers in that it's free-moving and doesn't require an enclosed, fixed structure. To test it out, researchers built a 12 ft. high dome out of foam insulation in less ...

Valorizing the Normal: Reflections on the 2016 AIA National Convention, ft. special guest Fred Scharmen on Archinect Sessions #65

2016-05-26T18:22:00-04:00

Donna, Ken and Fred all converged in the meatspace that was the AIA National Convention last week in Philadelphia—to explore the massive Expo floor, visit local architecture, vote on resolutions and watch those keynotes (!) by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Neri Oxman and Rem Koolhaas. Spoiler alert: Rem's was the most boring.

For more information about the resolutions up for debate at the convention, check out our episode with Gregory Walker covering unpaid internships and WTC-truthers.

And don't forget to check out our ongoing coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale – we collaborated with the Taubman students setting up the US Pavilion, have a bunch of interviews with curators in the Features, and will soon be publishing dispatches from Venice to the News.

Listen to episode 65 of Archinect Sessions, "Valorizing the Normal":

iTunes: Click here to listen, and click the "Subscribe" button below the logo to automatically download new episodes.
Apple Podcast App (iOS): click here to subscribe
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"The Trumpeteers" – LACMA gets Lautner, AIA gets Spacey on Archinect Sessions #53

2016-02-18T18:27:00-05:00

We swear, no BIG or Trump on this episode. We discuss the donation of Lautner's breathtaking Sheats-Goldstein house, complete with jungle, nightclub and infinity tennis court, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to become the museum's first acquired piece of architecture (along with a sizable endowment for maintenance). The U.S. saw a major step forward into the realm of driverless cars, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google that its computers in autonomous vehicles could legally be counted as drivers, while the internet ogled Nissan's self-parking office chairs.

It's also that time of year again, when the AIA announces the keynote speakers for its National Convention (check out our podcast on last year's convention in Atlanta), and this year's threw us for a loop – first, actor Kevin Spacey was named as Day 1 speaker, and praised for his "disruption" of "appointment television". Neri Oxman will give the Day 2 keynote, a very solid choice if not somew...

A unified approach to grown structures

2014-12-01T15:29:00-05:00

The video shows 15 different variations of one computational growth process. Based on this process we created a series of 3D printed wearables in cooperation with Prof. Neri Oxman from the MIT Media Lab.

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture

2012-12-16T20:56:00-05:00

So when people look at you know, at the ability to 3D print using a robotic arm, they're very, very curious about the possibility of in the future, printing full scale houses, so I think the media lab and specifically in the Media Matter Group, we don't focus only on efficiency translations. For that, I would open a practice in the commercial world, but that's not the function of this lab...

Neri Oxman founder of the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab was recently profiled in a 30-minute segment and interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN also published a short essay in which Ms. Oxman begins to define a design credo suitable for the contemporary context, wherein the World-as-Machine is replaced by the World-as- Organism. The five components include; Growth over Assembly, Integration over Segregation, Heterogeneity over Homogeneity, Difference over Repetition and Material is the New Software.

As Bruce Sterling noted elsewhere "Looks like Prof Neri’s working up a manifesto there."

'Nature is a brilliant engineer'

2011-06-07T13:00:18-04:00

Haifa-born Oxman, 35, one of the world's leading researchers in the field of digital architecture, is currently studying how our bones are affected by environmental conditions and by the weight that is brought to bear on them, and how such knowledge can be applied in other areas of life. It is known, for instance, that astronauts in outer space lose bone mass because of the absence of gravity, whereas women when they are pregnant develop stronger bones in order to withstand the added load.