“Humans, organisms, materials, the environment, they’re all appropriated and referred to in synergy and harmony. They’re all part of the design process.”
Neri Oxman
Silkworms, ants, bacteria, or bees are hardly welcome in an architectural office next to drafting boards and paper models, but their presence is an essential part of the work done at Oxman, Neri Oxman’s nature-centric architectural practice. The studio features a wet-lab facility where scientists, engineers, artists, and craftspeople work together, learning from the different biological organisms that drive design interests, timelines, processes, and form. Their work prioritizes nature and biological processes, subverting design approaches that focus on objects and assembly and replacing them with systems and growth.
Founded in 2020, Oxman’s creative principles have grown out of Neri Oxman’s career, which started in medicine; she attended medical school before pursuing architecture degrees. Much like scientific principles, a number of interdependent tenets guide the architecture practice’s mission. The languages of design and of biology are skillfully and interchangeably used—for instance, proposing a scheme that borrows the Krebs cycle (the energy-producing chemical chain of reactions in cells) as a model for human creativity. The logic of creating a new vocabulary for architecture, based on biological systems, continues throughout the work, where growth and building become synonyms, and at the end of the objects’ life, decay replaces disposal.
One of the more literal projects at Oxman displays this translation of biological processes into architecture: Raycounting does what the name promises. After measuring light rays and their penetration and intensity on a given surface, a computer algorithm assigns that surface a curvature. It is then able to produce three-dimensional sculptures that respond to the luminosity conditions of an environment, suggesting that large structures can be dynamically built in response to their context—like façades that respond to sunlight.
The field name coined to encompass the work is “material ecology,” an integration of “biology, material science, and engineering, and computer science, with emphasis on environmentally informed digital design and fabrication,” as Oxman explains. Her Silk Pavilion project proves the potential for the integration of these disciplines. In it, the spinning patterns of silkworms respond to environmental conditions, such as varying temperature and luminosity, with the aid of a computer-controlled robotic arm, in order to create a dome benefiting from the changing chemical density of the silk. A collaboration of the Mediated Matter Group at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Oxman obtained a doctoral degree, the project addresses some of the contextual references for the creation of material ecology: openness to speculation, an avid interest in manufacturing new materials to design with, and objects that are adaptable and responsive, or performance-based.
Neri Oxman’s work brings forward a long history of architects learning from nature. The architect has chosen not only to learn from its forms, but also its processes and systems, imagining new materials, shapes, stakeholders, and terms.
Note: Opening quote is from the MoMA Audio stop for Silk Pavilion.
Larissa Guimaraes, independent scholar, 2024
