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."
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."
The first, Oo (pronounced 'O-Zero'), is focused on product fabrication and described as a "vertically integrated approach to biopolymer design." The second, EDEN, focuses on ecological design for structures and landscapes. The third, ALEF, is meant to explore possibilities for agricultural production and combat the state of monocropping that has been shown to destabilize ancient ecosystems.
OXMAN adds further that its lab space is "one of the most advanced digital fabrication facilities in New York City." The space includes a robotics shop, wet lab, gallery space, and plan nursery and is equipped for a diverse staff of up to 133 engineers and scientists of various academic backgrounds and expertise.
Oxman left the MIT Media Lab to found OXMAN in 2020 after serving as a tenured professor there for over three years.
28 Comments
Research? Scientists do research.
This is art, and art is fine.
The fine art of selling 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" as a "radical new species of design practice".
They seem to be trying to assume the guru mantle William McDonough seemed to have 15 or so years ago. It's a canny move for a budding starchitect to wrap their design firm in purported hard science. Running a crew dressed in lab coats makes your black turtleneck wearing competitors over in Brooklyn look shallow and silly.
Built with the blood of genocidal maniacs
Neri and her gahbage husband are zi0s. Ackman is a pos fomenting the blacklisting of students speaking out on gen0cide. This project has the backing of VC trash. They can rot in hell
Exactly. It would seem that if you are somehow in the right mix of people, even worthless garbage will be celebrated, lauded and given funding to. Sadly, this is the nature of architectural academia, but thankfully a lot of younger folk see through this shit and realize what is actually up.
<shrug> rich people gonna rich people
The rich wives in my town make do with running little interior decorating shops.
That's basically what this is, multiplied by "billionaire pretention".
She was a tenured professor at MIT for three years?
This is a fascinating example of the role that privilege and access to vast wealth can play in the career of an architect in the USA.
It will be interesting to watch. It looks like all the limitations of money, university affiliation, client service, etc. have been removed here. There is little excuse for Oxman not to produce great things, if they are indeed capable of that.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The rich are different from you and me"
Ernest Hemingway: "Yes, they have more money"
. . . and with enough money you can buy ANYTHING and ANYONE.
I am not a defender of N Oxman; I think she is a high-end hustler, but is there any useful critique of her work that goes beyond the fashion industry and decorative uses?
I don't know any of her work to be beyond the fashion industry or decorative uses. https://oxman.com/work
The research into using chitin as a structural material was awesome, IMO. But maybe other people are also doing it.
The Eden Tower design on their website is in dire need of input from vertical transportation and code consultants. Overall, it looks like student work. Art pieces and buildings never figured out past a student level is what I think a lot of young people nowadays want to do for their whole careers. Oxman has figured out how to do it (as long as the family fortune continues to be available).
It is student work cuz she probably stole it from a student, IMHO
How does one judge the work of a 'high-end hustler'? The sad thing is this kind of work is passed off as cutting edge design work, fooling a lot of student's that they will be paid to research instead of work for their fellow person.
She has access to serious capital, which means she can determine the value of her work vs having others determine the value of her work (like us plebs on this forum) Also high end hustler seems to connote some other dimension to her work. Seems a bit jeally/sour grapes to me as a few years ago, I might have only heard praises for her beauty and intelligence.
@orhan I remember multiple criticisms of her "melanin" project along the lines of some of the questions posed here but perhaps more pointed. Not sure if they were on other socials, in email or what but can't find them now...
Here's more on that early 2000s "skyscraper"
why make buildings more simple when you can make them impossibly complicated seems to be the motto - but it ends up looking like a jetson's knock-off.
I replicated this same comment on dezeen, somebody deleted it. snowflakes.
She's not a serious researcher anymore, ever since she left the Media Lab. She enjoys a handsome amount of cultural cache, and virtually limitless funding from her husband. Oxman can do anything she wants.
Neri hit the architectural goldmine. y'all are just jealous. admit it: you'd love to be doing endless experimentation between art and architecture and design without serious consequences lol.
Architectural Goldmine = Shit rich, asshole husband. Got it.
I’ll admit liking her experimentation, but let me put this way; Jeffery Dahmer was the nice guy, boy next door, but when we found out he was a serial killer, well then I knew at least he wasn’t a genocide supporting maniac.
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