THE FUTURIST
She’s the former model turned MIT professor who has captivated everyone from Brad Pitt to the Dalai Lama. She might also have the answer to saving the planet. Molly Langmuir meets NERI OXMAN
Meet Neri Oxman: the woman marrying science and design to change the way we interact with the world around us – she’s making headlines
The designer and architect Neri Oxman carefully makes her way up the steps to the stage of MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. It’s late February, and Oxman, a tenured professor at the school, is nearly seven months pregnant. She wears a black top, black velvet trousers and high black patent stilettos, with her wildly curly hair loosely pulled up, as it often is, to form a halo around her head. Onstage she gives the audience, assembled for an event celebrating the university’s new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a smile. ‘It has become increasingly challenging to differentiate between the man-made and the nature-grown,’ she says, her hands loosely cupped around her belly. ‘In my [research] group, we believe in the future; we will not build our products and our architecture, but rather we will grow them.’
Since 2O1I, Oxman has directed the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab, renowned for producing radically interdisciplinary work. Even in that context, her speciality is so novel, that she had to come up with a new term for it (she calls it ‘material ecology’). Technically, Oxman uses computational design and elements of architecture, 3D printing, materials science, engineering and synthetic biology to develop solutions ‘to problems that may not yet exist’, as she puts it. This means she has produced everything from a silk pavilion (a dome of silk fibres spun by a robotic arm, completed by 6,5OO live silkworms), to a design concept for a wearable digestive system incorporating photosynthetic bacteria that convert solar energy into
sugar, which could be utilised, she says, on Jupiter’s moons. But what all Oxman’s work has in common is a pristine, fractal beauty that’s generally only found in nature. Even before receiving her PhD in design and computation from MIT in 2O1O, Oxman, now 43, had come to be considered one of the leading figures in her field. Since then, her acclaim has only grown. Her TED Talk has been viewed over two million times. Last year, she won one of Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Awards. In February 2O2O, she’ll have an exhibition dedicated to her work at MoMA. Her approach has attracted the attention of Björk (for whom she produced a range of 3D-printed Rottlace masks), fashion designer Iris van Herpen (with whom she collaborated on 3D-printed clothes), and the Dalai Lama and Brad Pitt (who were both interested in the workings of her design project Gemini Acoustic Chaise – a chaise longue that turns the sitter’s voice into a vibration). ‘It’s quite exceptional, the amount of attention she gets,’ says Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. ‘But it’s well deserved.’ As pioneering inventor and scientist Danny Hillis says: ‘I think we will look back and realise she saw the direction the world was heading earlier than other people.’ The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which has so much of its infrastructure visible on its exterior that it looks like an oil rig, is exactly the kind of building Oxman believes the world is moving away from. (She envisions buildings with a façade made from a 3D-printed continuous layer of glass that controls the temperature of the interior and harnesses solar energy.) But, last spring, a piece by Oxman and her team was displayed there: a fivemetre-tall structure called Aguahoja I, which looked like a shrine made from a set of enormous, folded cicada wings. Crafted from a series of 3D-printed membranes, Aguahoja I was created using a substance that, depending on
“NERI saw WHERE THE WORLD was HEADING EARLIER THAN OTHER PEOPLE”
its concentration, could be solid or transparent, stiff or soft. But the material itself – a mixture largely consisting of chitosan, a crustaceanderived polymer (Oxman got her first batch via shrimp from the restaurant Legal Sea Foods); pectin (a fibre found in apples and other fruits); and cellulose (which comes from plants) – was water-soluble and biodegradable. Chitosan, pectin and cellulose also happen to be among the most abundant polymers on earth. Stick the membranes back in the ocean, and marine life would consume them to produce more chitosan. As Oxman asks in her 2O15 TED Talk, ‘So why are we still designing with plastics?’ She meant the question rhetorically, but later I ask her why she thought we were still designing with plastic. ‘What makes [these issues] complicated are the vehicles we have in place to create and enforce policy,’ she says. ‘To demolish plastics, we need to radically align our economic models with consumer good.’ Despite her work offering the promise of a more perfect future, in other words, we remain mired in the problems of the present. Though, she adds, ‘It takes a village, not a lab. But we remain hopeful.’
The first thing Oxman tells me when we meet in the lobby of the Media Lab a few hours later is that the night before, during a bout of pregnancy-related insomnia, she had practised her presentation, only to discover onstage that, due to a technological glitch, her slides rotated through faster than usual. But she seems to find this amusing, rather than a high-octane nightmare. Oxman, who speaks in a way that’s poetic yet enigmatic, and who describes her students as being like her family and herself as an introvert doing a really good job in public, comes off as passionate but not easily perturbed. (This is true online, too, even if in programmed form: her email auto response begins, ‘Greetings and gratitude for your message.’)
Oxman was raised in Haifa, Israel, a cosmopolitan city bordered by the Mediterranean Sea and Mount Carmel. Even as a child, she had an innate sense of equanimity. ‘She took life head-on: curious, inquisitive, and determined,’ says her younger sister, Keren. ‘She was also very beautiful but not preoccupied with it.’ The girls’ family was close-knit. Their parents were well-known architects – Rivka Oxman specialised in digital design, while Robert Oxman studied the history of architecture and modern design – and their home was modernist, with ocean views and fluid interior spaces. Oxman also spent time at her grandmother’s house nearby, which was engulfed by a garden. ‘She taught me how to count clouds, pick mushrooms and press flowers,’ Oxman says. ‘She cultivated in me a sense of wonder.’
Oxman recognised her need for solitude early on, but in high school, Keren says, she was social and popular. She was always fascinated with the biological world, but also had an impeccable eye for design and aesthetics. ‘Her room was always extremely organised,’ Keren says. ‘Her closet, too. Her drawers, everything.’ Scouted on a bus, Oxman did some modelling in her teens, then was drafted at age 18 into the Israeli Air Force, where she served for nearly three years. She began medical school, then dropped out not long after her grandmother passed away. ‘I wasn’t self-realising as I had wished for,’ she says. The next week, architecture school entry exams were being held, and Oxman
signed up. ‘I sat for three hours and drew and drew, and I just fell in love with the idea of entering architecture school,’ she says. She began studying at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, then transferred to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. ‘She was one of the first to write algorithms for her designs,’ says Michael Weinstock, her thesis advisor. ‘She had a formidable work ethic. I used to wonder, Does she do anything else? She never seemed stressed or exhausted.’ Oxman graduated in 2OO4, and the next year began her PhD at MIT.
Since then, Oxman has produced a wide-ranging body of work, though there are common elements. ‘Nearly everything we create is part of the natural ecology and interacts with the ecology,’ Oxman tells me in her lab, which has shelves displaying both natural and manmade items. It looks like a high-tech curio shop, though her office is sparse, with colour-coded books on the shelves. (If she could, Oxman says she would live in a white cube.) ‘We think about decay just as seriously as we think about growth,’ she says. There have so far been few practical applications. ‘But I believe the influence, more than the immediate application, is where its importance resides,’ says Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the department of architecture and design at MoMA. Starchitect Bjarke Ingels, a friend of Oxman’s, points out: ‘As designers and architects, we give form to the future. Or we give form to the future we’d like to see happen. It’s about the life we want to live.’
Oxman tends to exist exclusively in the highbrow quadrant of culture. She listens to Beethoven, Schubert and jazz. She watches old-school cinema. ‘Give me Fellini, and I’m on it,’ she says. She has a flower press (not necessarily highbrow, but it makes her sound like the heroine of a 19th-century novel). Asked in an interview with TheEditorial where she gets her news, Oxman responded, ‘I’ve always preferred the gossip of the planets to chin-wag.’ What’s an event she looks forward to? ‘New moons.’ When it comes to any of the more material facts of life, Oxman seems to take the benefits they offer and disregard the rest. Has her appearance ever led people to discount her intelligence? ‘No,’ she says. Though if they did? ‘I would just fly over it.’
It’s weird to imagine this type of person interfacing with tabloid culture. But that’s what happened a year and a half ago, when Brad Pitt came to visit her lab. Paparazzi hounded Oxman, and she ended up on the cover of Us Weekly alongside an image of Pitt. ‘Secret Love Trips!’ read the cover. Inside, a ‘source’ declared, ‘Being around Neri is intoxicating, as if you are flying high above the mountains… Brad is glowing around her.’ In fact, Oxman had been dating hedge funder Bill Ackman for seven months. He’d contacted her after two friends – one of whom was former editor-in-chief of The New Republic Marty Peretz, who’d known Oxman for years – suggested it. ‘The match was explosive, in the very best sense,’ Peretz says. (Oxman and Ackman both told me they’d traced their respective lineages to nearby Eastern European towns. ‘There was this connection that was beyond time,’ Oxman says.)
Soon Ackman was regularly visiting Oxman in Cambridge. ‘I called her Miss Too Good To Be True for a while,’ he says. ‘But over time, I’ve come to realise there is a spiritual, magical quality about her.’ (He credits her with foretelling the comeback of his firm, which has struggled but this past year has been up 4O%.) ‘People regularly fall in love with Neri,’ he says. ‘Men and women, from all walks of life.’ As for what actually
On carrying textbooks: “INSTEAD OF TALKING about MY PURSE, PEOPLE MIGHT as WELL LEARN SOMETHING ”
happened with Pitt, ‘The Hollywood press is the most fraudulent in the world,’ he says. ‘They have pictures of Neri saying she’s on the phone with Brad; meanwhile, I’m talking to her as she’s dealing with the paparazzi.’
Oxman admits it was challenging, but once she decided to treat the experience as an anthropological experiment, it became revealing and amusing. She invited a photographer outside her home to share her Uber to work. ‘He was going to make it there anyway,’ she says. She also walked around carrying textbook The Feynman Lectures on Physics. ‘I thought, Instead of talking about what purse I carry, they might as well learn something.’ (About Pitt, Oxman says, ‘He’s an incredible human being and I consider him a good friend.’) In January, she married Ackman – the father of her daughter, who was born last spring.
Oxman and I meet up for the second time a few weeks before her due date at a café around the corner from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She and Ackman, who is reportedly worth $1.1 billion, have been renting a place nearby while the apartment he recently bought, a 13-room penthouse, is being renovated by Pritzkerwinning architect Sir Norman Foster. The past year, during which Oxman has been on sabbatical, has been a period of major change. Beyond the pregnancy and the marriage, she has relocated to New York (she still expects to continue her affiliation with MIT), where she is planning to open up a novel kind of architecture and design practice. ‘The idea is the only client will be nature,’ she says. (She’s still working out how it will make money. ‘Exactly,’ she says when I ask her about it. ‘Good question.’) And she’ll continue pushing forward with other projects as well, including a series of 3D-printed pieces, Totems, in which liquid melanin is encapsulated in translucent tubes. Oxman imagines the pigment could one day be incorporated into buildings’ exteriors, enabling structures to have a ‘skin’ that tans in the sun. Totems also explores melanin’s dual aspects – the substance both enables earth’s biodiversity (it’s present in a wide array of species) and has resulted in so much human suffering. ‘Occasionally she does admit she’s overwhelmed,’ says Ackman about Oxman. ‘So we now have evidence of humanity. She is not a cyborg character.’
Oxman has long talked about her work in relation to motherhood. As she said in her MIT talk, ‘Using this single word, “mother”, changing from a noun into a verb, we enter a world, an era, where through computation we mother nature by design.’ When I ask if pregnancy has had an impact on her research, she smiles almost sheepishly. ‘I thought, How dare I talk about mothering nature without experiencing this,’ she says.
Because she works with living materials, it’s easy to see why one might describe it this way, and many others have, too. As Hillis argues, the world is moving into a period when ‘artifacts are simultaneously artificial and natural; they are both made and born’. Oxman’s work, he believes, is emblematic of this. Yet he also offers words of caution: ‘What are we to think about this new relationship with technology and with each other?’ he wrote in 2O16. ‘Should we fear it or embrace it? The answer is both. Like any new powerful force in the world, like science, it will be used for both good and evil… Recognising this does not absolve us from our responsibility, it reminds us why it is important. We are remaking ourselves, and we need to choose wisely what we are to become.’
On pregnancy: ”I THOUGHT, ‘how DARE I talk ABOUT MOTHERING NATURE without EXPERIENCING THIS ”