Neri Oxman (Hebrew: נרי אוקסמן; born February 6, 1976) is an American-Israeli designer and former professor known for art that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work.
Oxman was a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and led the Mediated Matter research group. She has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Boston's Museum of Science, SFMOMA, and the Centre Pompidou, which have her works in their permanent collections.
Many of Oxman's projects use new platforms and techniques for 3D printing and fabrication, often incorporating nature and biology. They include co-fabrication systems for building hybrid structures with silkworms, bees, and ants; a water-based fabrication platform that built structures such as Aguahoja out of chitosan; and the first 3D printer for optically transparent glass. Other projects include printed clothing, wearables, and furniture.
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Early life and education
Neri Oxman was born in Haifa, Israel, the daughter of architecture professors Robert and Rivka Oxman. Her sister Keren Oxman is an artist. Oxman grew up in Israel, spending time in her parents' architecture studio and at her grandmother's house.
After graduating from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1993, she served for three years in the Israeli Air Force, reaching the rank of first lieutenant. Following her military service, she attended Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School for two years before switching to architecture. She began her architectural studies at Technion Israel Institute of Technology and finished her degree at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, graduating in 2004. In 2005, Oxman began Ph.D. studies in architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by William J. Mitchell. Her thesis focused on material-aware design. She graduated from the doctoral program in 2010.
Career
In 2006, Oxman began an interdisciplinary research project at MIT called material ecology, to experiment with generative design. She became a professor at MIT in 2010, and was given her own lab, the Mediated Matter group at MIT Media Lab. She was granted tenure at MIT in 2017.
Her research interests involve parametric and contextual design, including engineering techniques to realize those designs in various materials and contexts. Examples include creating a "skin" for buildings that can tan in the sun to create shade, and structural biodegradable polymers. She has published collaborations in biology, medicine, wearables, and the design of fabrication tools.
Her work has been mentioned as an inspiration for changing how materials and structures are designed. In 2016, she helped launch the open Journal of Design Science, an "antidisciplinary" journal which journal co-founder Joi Ito described as "working in spaces that simply do not fit into any existing academic discipline." She wrote that science, engineering, design and art are connected, with the output of each serving as input for the others.
Oxman's early projects took the form of surfaces, furniture, or objects that could be worn or put on display. Since 2013, most projects have included temporary or interactive installations, including the production process and study of its material properties. These include both mechanical processes, such as for Ocean Pavilion and Glass I, and biological ones, such as for Silk Pavilion and Synthetic Apiary.
Oxman's work has been included in the permanent collections of museums such as New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna, the Smithsonian, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Science. In 2020, the MoMA displayed the first exhibition of her work as its own collection.
Oxman serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the WORLD.MINDS Foundation, where she contributes to interdisciplinary conversations at the nexus of design, science, and society.
Mediated Matter
Oxman's Mediated Matter research group uses computational design, digital fabrication, 3D printing, materials science and synthetic biology for large and small structures. The group developed its own methods and printing platforms, and worked with a range of 3D production systems. Projects have ranged in scale from enclosures and large furniture, to artwork and clothes, to biocomposites, artificial valves, and DNA assembly. Production methods include taking images of a biological or natural sample, developing algorithms to produce similar structures, and developing new manufacturing processes to realize the results.
Projects include wearable clothes and tools,
solar-powered and biodegradable designs, new artistic techniques, and construction of surfaces, walls, coverings and load-bearing elements.
The Silk Pavilion, an installation designed in 2013, was noted for its fabrication method as much as its final form. It was woven by 6,500 free-ranging silkworms on a nylon-frame dome. Experiments with the silkworms identified how they would respond to different surfaces, and what would encourage them to spin onto an existing structure rather than spinning a cocoon. The frame of a large polyhedral dome was loosely woven by a robotic arm out of thin nylon threads, and suspended in an open room. The dome was designed with gaps where it would be warmest. Silkworms were released onto the frame in waves, where they added layers of silk before being removed. This involved engineering, sericulture, and modeling sun in the room. The resulting pavilion was hung so that people could stand inside it. This was reprised in 2020 for Silk Pavilion II, installed as part of the Oxman exhibition at MoMA.
The Synthetic Apiary, a room-sized installation built in 2015, studied the behavior of bees in an indoor environment, including how they built hives in and around different structures. This was developed in collaboration with a beekeeping company, as a way of testing possible responses to colony loss, and exploring how biological niches could be integrated into buildings.
In 2012, Oxman printed a set of body-sized wearables, Imaginary Beings, inspired by legendary creatures. She also collaborated with van Herpen and materials scientist W. Craig Carter on Anthozoa, a cape and skirt evocative of marine life.
Recent work
Starting in 2020, Oxman's studio, Oxman Architects, has explored similar themes in their projects. They produced a documentary about their work, Nature × Humanity, which became the name of a 2022 exhibition of their work at SFMOMA.
In 2020, she created the final version of Silk Pavilion II, weaving a new pavilion in Padua, Italy in collaboration with a silkworm-rearing facility in nearby Teolo. The structure was constructed on a dissolvable hyperboloid.
In 2021, her team revisited the Synthetic Apiary, constructing a new environment for bees to build hives, printed with embedded pheromones. The resulting hive structures were analyzed by CT scans to allow digital reconstruction and provide insight into the bees' construction process. They also designed an experiment testing how bees respond to low-gravity environments, and fabricated a new type of payload module to house the experiment on a Blue Origin suborbital flight.
Oxman was the architectural consultant for Francis Ford Coppola's 2024 film Megalopolis, and her work influenced the futuristic cityscape depicted in the movie. She also makes a cameo appearance in the film.
Controversies
Association with Jeffrey Epstein
In 2019, an MIT report revealed that Oxman's lab had received $125,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, part of a series of donations (including one for a "Knotty Discretionary Fund") he made to the Media Lab and its director Joi Ito. The report also revealed that in October 2015, Oxman had met in-person with Epstein, along with Ito, MIT Media Lab professor Danny Hillis, and two MIT students.
Oxman had asked members of her lab to prepare and send a gift to Epstein, according to documents shared by an MIT employee. A graduate student in the lab raised concerns, emailing to Oxman: "Have you read the articles about this Jeff Epstein? He seems pretty shady. . . . Just wanted to point it out in case you weren't aware." Oxman later confirmed that she was aware of Epstein's background, adding in a reply to the email that "Jeff E." should always be "confidential" and told the student that they were not sponsored by Epstein.
Plagiarism allegations
In late 2023, Oxman's husband, Bill Ackman, joined calls to remove Claudine Gay as president of Harvard over plagiarism accusations. Shortly after, journalists at Business Insider published articles alleging Oxman plagiarized from a range of sources, including from Wikipedia, in her 2010 PhD dissertation and three journal articles.
The alleged plagiarism included several passages copied almost verbatim from the Wikipedia articles on weaving, principle of minimum energy, constitutive equation, heat flux, raster graphics, and manifold, duplication of an image from the article on raster graphics without attribution, and footnotes copied nearly verbatim from Wolfram MathWorld and the website for the design software package Rhinoceros 3D.
Oxman subsequently apologized for what she called "citation errors". Business Insider's owner Axel Springer said that it investigated the outlet's "processes" after Ackman questioned their motives, and stood by its reporting.
Design philosophy
Oxman's philosophy of material ecology was developed in 2006 while a graduate student at MIT. It combines 3D printing techniques with biology, engineering, materials science, and computer science to create objects and structures through growth and without assembly. She proposed developing a material ecology with "holistic products, characterized by property gradients and multi-functionality" – placing humanity in harmony with nature, in contrast to assembly lines and "a world made of parts".
She described her work as shifting "from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one." This includes using biological shapes as inspiration, textures, and even fabrication, such as the glowing bacteria in Mushtari and the silkworms in the Silk Pavilion.
Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli described Oxman's work as a way to "decipher nature's myriad [design] lessons and render them digitally for future application at all scales."
Oxman's approach to form generation and environmental design is cited by rapid prototypers in other fields, and gave a popular 2015 TED talk on material ecology. In 2019, the Netflix docu-series Abstract: The Art of Design featured her work in its second season.
Personal life
Oxman was previously married to Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. In 2019, she married investor and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, with whom she has a daughter. They are co-trustees of the Pershing Square Foundation.
Works
Early works
Oxman's early work focused on 3D printing, including projects like Carpal Skin, which used the profile of pain for a person with carpal tunnel syndrome to ease their discomfort, and Monocoque (2007), a demonstration of how a printed structure could support its weight via its exterior skin rather than interior supports. This required a printer that could simultaneously print multiple materials with different structural properties, a process she named "variable property rapid prototyping". In 2008, futurist Bruce Sterling called her work "shatteringly different from anything before". Later works involved fabrication by animals or by natural processes.
In 2016, Oxman worked with Björk to create a mask based on the singer's face, and worked with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen to 3D-print a collection of wearable couture.
Gallery
Art, surfaces, and furniture
Processes and installations
Publications
2020: Hybrid Living Materials
2016: Recursive symmetries for complex additive manufacturing
2015: Additive Manufacturing of Optically Transparent Glass
2015: Flow-based fabrication
2013: Compound Fabrication
2011: Variable property rapid prototyping
2010: Material-based Design Computation, PhD-thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards and recognition
Oxman is a senior fellow in the Design Futures Council, and a Royal Designer for Industry in the UK. She has won the Vilcek Prize in Design, a National Design Award, and a SFMOMA Contemporary Vision Award.
In 2016, she served as a culture leader at the World Economic Forum and received MIT's Collier Medal. In 2018, she received a Design Innovation Medal from the London Design Festival. The following year, Aguahoja was named "Sustainable Design of the Year" and "Design Project of the Year" in Dezeen's annual awards.