Since she created her interplanetary wardrobe, known as Wanderers (2014), Neri Oxman has pioneered a future-forward genre of biodesign that marries the curvaceous forms of life with the cool smoothness of digital fabrication. Over time her projects have gotten larger in scale, more ambitious, and have ceded more control to the organisms with which she works—bees, silkworms, fungus, and bioengineered bacteria. Now Neri is working on the scale of the city. What that means for the urban skyline might surprise you.
This February, Neri opened a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Nature x Humanity”. The exhibition includes the latest work from Neri’s lab in New York City, her new home following 16 years as a student and then professor at the MIT Media Lab.
Biodesigned interviewed Neri about her show, lab, and visions for living architecture. For Part One, we asked a single question. Neri’s response merited its own section.
Biodesigned.
What are three questions every biodesigner must consider?
Neri.
What is life? Artificial wombs and embryos made from skin cells are already revolutionizing reproductive biology. CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technology can be programmed to target specific stretches of genetic code and edit them at precise locations. Gene drives may soon provide an effective means of accelerating the inheritance of genetic modifications through specific wild populations or entire species. With these systems in place, we can permanently modify genes in living cells and organisms to treat genetic causes of disease, while also controlling genetic expression. From here, creating or permanently altering life is all too real.
What are the ethical implications? There is a beautiful quote by Francis Bacon that states, “Nature, to be commanded must be obeyed.” Those who cannot obey nature are unable to command it. Every single project within the arc of our work has gotten us thinking about the ethical considerations associated with biodesign. For example, With Silk Pavilion I and II, we were introduced with opportunities to experiment with transgenic silkworms, but we decided against them. In both of these projects, relationships created between the designers, the robots, and the silkworms were ones of synergy. We co-designed and co-fabricated silkworm-spun architecture while enabling healthy metamorphosis for the silkworms. This way of producing silk products represents a vast departure from age-old traditions in sericulture wherein the procurement of silk thread comes at the cost of thousands of silkworm lives per product.
How can we design on the scales of nature? Design structures are often static and materially homogenous, while biological structures are dynamic and materially heterogeneous. Living things respond, grow, and adapt. They perform a multiplicity of simultaneous functions across scales, optimized for structural load, environmental pressures, spatial constraints, etc. Consider a tree, which simultaneously communicates, nourishes, bends, and stands tall. Bricks exhibit no hint of intelligence and synthetic fibers have yet to fire electrical signals into the textiles they inhabit. While we crudely assemble polymers, concrete, steel, and glass, biology grows intricate structures using material practices refined over eons of evolution. Can we close the gap?
Biodesigned.
How has the field of biodesign evolved since you started your practice?
Neri.
It depends on who and how you ask. There are generally three approaches to biodesign, each distinguished by its relationship with nature—from nature-inspired design to design-inspired nature. They are:
1) Nature-inspired projects that have co-evolved with digital fabrication;
2) Nature-informed projects that have co-evolved with materials engineering; and
3) Nature-grown projects that have co-evolved with biology and/or synthetic biology.
Another lens through which to see the evolution of biodesign over past decades is the relationship between elements that make up bio and elements that make up design. This relationship has progressed from one of containment (e.g. a 3D printed glass vessel containing bio-based materials) to one of synergy between the two (e.g. a structure designed to vary its properties both as a function of external environmental conditions and internal biological processes).
In our own practice—first with the Mediated Matter Group at MIT and now with my team at OXMAN—we’ve made it our intention to lace and intertwine the disciplines. Digital fabrication, materials science and engineering, and synthetic biology have all contributed to our approach—Material Ecology—in ways that express synergy across physical, digital, and biological domains.
Our Turing test of biodesign is a test of a designed object’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a living material. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the grown from the made, the design artifact is said to have passed the test.
B.
So what is your current vision for the future of the built environment and its relationships with people and other organisms in the environment?
N.
The vision? Grow everything.
In the future, human-made materials will be a combination of grown and made, created using a mixture of natural and synthetic techniques. Relationships between materials, humans, and organisms of the natural world will embody complete synergy. Embracing complexity and diversity across systems and scales in design, we open ourselves to advancing beyond mere maintenance (i.e., conservation) towards the betterment (i.e., augmentation) of nature.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use the narrative of a wasp and an orchid to illustrate the concept of “becoming” [1]. In this view, it becomes challenging to separate between the “parts” (the wasp and the orchid) that make the “whole” (the reproductive cycle of the orchid, ecology at work). Certain orchids are known to display physical and sensory features of female wasps to attract male wasps into a “trans-species courtship dance,” which unfolds as the wasp attempts to mate with a flower. During this “dance,” pollen is transferred to the wasp’s body. The wasp—seduced by a plant—is literally co-opted into the orchid’s reproductive apparatus.
In our practice, my team and I see socially constructed dichotomies as one: city and environment, product and body, social fabric and micro-climate, etc. As activist designers, we collaborate with both nature and the companies working with us to create designs that embody a set of first principles in service of nature, and thereby, in service of humanity.
B.
Interesting! At the SFMOMA exhibition you display a scale model of New York City and how it might evolve over the next 400 years called Man-Nahāta. It looks like a sort of fungus overtakes the city. Can you describe what’s happening in the piece?
N.
The backdrop for Man-Nahāta is the forthcoming film by Francis Ford Coppola—Megalopolis—in which an architect and scientist seek to rebuild New York City as a utopia with an intelligent, infinitely adaptable material called “megalon”. In a series of studies for the film, we look back to pre-1600s Manhattan, when the Island was a diverse, natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, and wetlands, home to the Lenape people and known as Mannahatta (“land of many hills”). We then look ahead to an imagined urban future, using computational growth algorithms that can be applied across material, architectural, and urban scales to offer a design framework based on principles of growth and self-organization. This enables the generation of a vast and diverse set of forms not unlike the structures that emerge through biological growth—including the networks of fungal mycelium extending across the globe for trillions of miles.
In our studies, we propose synergy between contemporary Manhattan’s cultural diversity and ancient Mannahatta’s biotic livelihood: the grid and the garden. Informed by climate projections and inspired by urban habitats such as stone circles and megaliths, the series transitions from a human-centric biosphere to a distributed nature-centric landscape, evolving harmony between the built and the grown. Across four centuries, Man-Nahāta experiences emergence, growth, decay, and rebirth as a built-grown singularity.
B.
Let’s talk a bit about consensus: there are 8.5 million people in New York City. Is this future something you believe people would agree to or something they would succumb to?
N.
In a way, it is not up to us—it is and it isn’t. If we do not agree to a future of social and urban design which emphasizes adaptation, flexibility, and collaboration, we will succumb to a future foretold by climate change.
Manhattan today is a precarious habitat threatened by extreme forces of rapid climate change, with future projections reported by the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including higher temperatures, increasingly frequent heavy downpours, and a rising sea level that will further increase storm surges and coastal flooding. In an extreme scenario, global surface temperature is projected to rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit and global mean sea level 16 meters by the year 2400 [2].
We designed our way into this crisis through our short-sighted choices in materials, products, and buildings at the expense of the natural world. If we are to survive the sixth extinction, it is on us to design solutions to resolve, renew, and revisit our place on this planet.
B.
You’re creating a new 36,000 square-foot research facility in New York City. I’m reminded of the original Bell Labs, which was also here. What makes NYC the appropriate site?
N.
Only in the Big Apple can we recreate the Garden of Eden!
NYC is my new home. After more than 20 years in academia—first as a student and then as a tenured professor—it was time for a fresh perspective. I moved here out of love, married, fully pregnant, and eager to write the next chapter of my life.
But beyond my personal life, I am keen to nurture a new kind of biodesign “mecca” for makers in a city so saturated with cultural motion. In NYC, there is boundless opportunity to question and hopefully reinvent how we make products, how we build architecture, and how we plan cities.
Bell Labs circa 1940 was the Silicon Valley of its day. Its scientists and engineers took center stage in creating the greatest innovations of the Information Age. The protagonists of the “wet” version—think “Bell Labs goes Bio”—will be designers. I have no doubt that biodesign will be among the most important vocations in this century, and my team and I look forward to working with many of them within and alongside our new lab.
B.
In one word, what is the most pressing crisis for designers operating today? Climate, social inequality, violence, pollution, hunger?
N.
Empathy.
B.
How is the work in the SFMOMA show different from your other recent exhibitions?
N.
The exhibition at SFMOMA includes immersive galleries and a few debut pieces created since founding OXMAN in New York City. Through design and technological innovation across scales, the collection explores what it means to consider nature as the architect’s primary client.
I feel grateful and honored to have worked with two of the best design curators in the country, Paola Antonelli at MoMA and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher at SFMOMA. The exhibitions took (and take!) place across coasts and between COVID-19 variants—strange times! Each maestra has brilliantly represented unique dimensions about our work and practice.
Paola, along with the amazing Anna Burckhardt, focused on prototypes and archetypes. Every object in the Material Ecology exhibition was presented as a demonstration of new materials and/or new processes. Paola felt strongly that we should prioritize process over product, favoring the procedural and the speculative over the finalized and fully deployed. I found this incredibly compelling and obviously inspiring, as it aligns so well with how I exist as a thinker and a maker.
For Nature x Humanity, Jennifer brought forward a different lens through which to curate our work. For instance, the ‘sister’ pavilions, Aguahoja I and III, are presented together; one indoors juxtaposed with one outdoors, experiencing the full force of the natural world. Jennifer’s curatorial genius was in repositioning the architectural project in the context of nature-centric design as the intellectual centerpiece of the show. In general, there are fewer artifacts, more completed works, and endless thought-provoking questions!
[1] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, 1988.
[2] IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
Cite This Essay
Oxman, Neri. “The Three Questions: In Conversation with Neri Oxman.” Biodesigned: Issue 10, 28 February, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].