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...

Could scientists engineer synthetic organisms to stop climate change?

2015-04-08T14:12:00-04:00

Scientists and politicians the world over are looking for ways to halt or reverse [climate changes], a task that is fraught with difficulties in a world hooked on fossil fuels. One option increasingly discussed is terraforming—deliberately altering the environment in a way that cools the planet... Instead of creating global engineering projects, why not create life forms that do a similar job instead...

Ricard Sole and his associates at the ICREA-Complex Systems Lab in Barcelona are experimenting with the potentials of using synthetic organisms to terraform the planet. One advantage to such a project – as opposed to other terraforming ideas that would require engineering feats of unprecedented scale – is that the landscape could be changed with minimal human input, using "the growth and colonizing potential that life offers."

Of course, as the article notes, the potential problems are also massive, like, for example, unintentionally triggering feedback mechanisms that accelerate global warming, or devastate global food supplies. Looking back at other historical attempts to engineer biology to suit human interests, this seems a more likely outcome than not. But Sole and his team are trying to develop preventative measures against such runaway growth. And as the article notes, one day this may be an urgent necessity: "if and when that day comes, let’s hope we’ll be glad of the researc...

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Neri Oxman: Architecture's modern day Wonder Woman

Could scientists engineer synthetic organisms to stop climate change?