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Danny Lewis: Organic architecture usually means buildings that blend into the natural environment, even if they're made of brick, stone and concrete. But what if these buildings were actually made of organic materials? Architect and designer Neri Oxman believes that could revolutionize the structures we live and work in, and even repair our relationship with the natural world.

Neri Oxman: The dream, looking into the future, is these materials that can change the properties on the fly and become from stiff to opaque, from opaque to transparent, from stiff to soft. And I always, I like to think of reducing that dimensional mismatch between the built and the grown is one that extends or allows to increase the information dimension.

Danny Lewis: Oxman is the founder of the Mediated Matter Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She recently started her own design firm, where she's working on new materials and products that challenge traditional ideas of sustainability.

Neri Oxman: What we're really interested in doing is listening to nature and trying to understand what is the language of nature. Do we know how to listen?

Danny Lewis: From The Wall Street Journal, this is The Future Of Everything. I'm Danny Lewis. During our Future of Everything Festival in New York, WSJ Health and Science Bureau Chief Stefanie Ilgenfritz spoke with Oxman about how science, technology, and organic design are coming together to reshape the very materials we build with, from 3D printed glass to biodegradable concrete. That's after the break. And now, here's The Wall Street Journal's Stefanie Ilgenfritz speaking with designer and architect Neri Oxman. We've edited their conversation for time and clarity.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: I wanted to start with something basic. You practice material ecology. What is material ecology?

Neri Oxman: Material ecology. Material ecology is, simply stated, is taking materials, the materials with which we design our products, our buildings, our cities, and placing them in an ecological context. So as architects and designers, we usually design in three dimensions of space, X, Y, and Z. And then the product we design, again, whether it's a product, a building, a city, a wearable, any kind of product that we create, the product is static, it's not responsive, it's not adaptive. But when you look into nature, nature grows things and those things react and they adapt and they're flexible and they change over time. They actually grow and they develop. I call this a dimensional mismatch between what we build and how we grow. There are many, many, more dimensions in the natural world. Material ecology aims to reduce the dimensional mismatch by adding properties to materials to make them more responsive, more adaptive, more nature-like, more nature-friendly, and ultimately bring together the world of the made and the world of the grown.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: So you use biological materials, is that right, in the materials that you use to build products and structures?

Neri Oxman: So they could be nature-based or bio-based. They could be mineral-based or they could actually be made of biological materials as say crustaceans or shrimp shells, for example. But they could also be bio-based or DNA-based. So the design of the product always goes hand-in-hand with the design of the process to create it.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: Tell us about one of them that would give an example of what you're talking about?

Neri Oxman: Yeah. So, for example, let's start with a glass 3D printer. This was a 3D printer that prints optically transparent glass. And unlike molded glass or blown glass, what this enable is to print glass with geometrical features that are independently designed from the external features of the glass. And therefore you can design optical lenses in architectural scales, which lend themselves to the possibility of harnessing solar energy.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: So you have now moved from academia to the business world.

Neri Oxman: Yes.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: And you are taking some of the materials that you've developed and the processes to turn into a commercial product. So what made you think this was the time to make this a business model?

Neri Oxman: Yeah. If you always do what you always do, you always get what you always got. And it was time after 17 years at MIT to make a change. I also became a mother. And in 2020, this was the year that I learned from a good friend of mine at the Weitzmann Institute in Israel that the entropomass has exceeded the biomass on our planet. That was a very sad day for us designers.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: The biomass has been exceeded by?

Neri Oxman: The entropomass. So all things that we humans design and build.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: Things that we have built.

Neri Oxman: Exceed in mass all of the biomass on our planet. So take a moment to ingest and digest it. And I think it was coupled with motherhood and with a need to kind of urgently translate some of these ideas that got a lot of publicity through peer review journals, through exhibitions, and translate them in the real world to make real impact.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: So what are some of the real world products that you're working on with these materials?

Neri Oxman: Yeah, so we're currently working on three projects in three different scales. So I say the company's motto is nature-centric design, not human-centric design. And when you think through that lens, you start looking at products as sort of equal citizens in the world of nature-centric or nature informed design. So we're working on a shoe, on a car, on a building, and on a city, and we're working on these four projects at the same time.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: I'd like to ask you if you think the role of design in society is changing? And how will it change in the future?

Neri Oxman: It's changing. It should change and it will change. And the reason is that we are now sort of moving from, again, from product to process. The problems that we're dealing with as humanity, and I mean, just think about it, the geopolitical upheavals, the war, the pandemic, biodiversity loss, we've never had this great convergence of challenges in a single moment in time. Not that I can remember. And to add on top of it, the perils of climate change. Because of these very complex problems, designers need to move from designing products to designing systems. So that means that a product cannot be designed as a sort of a self-sustained product, but the product has a relationship to the environment. The tree has a relationship to the soil. The soil has a relationship to the fungi. The fungi has a relationship to other forest bacteria, et cetera, et cetera. Thinking about products as ecosystems is crucial to how we will design in the future. Whether it's healthcare, how does the pill interact with your microbiome? How does the microbiome interact with your wearable? How does your wearable filter vitamins into your skin? How does skin expels these vitamins out into other wearables, et cetera? Products will be designed in that kind of ecological context, material ecology, and in a systems based approach.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: Well, you've talked about doing design on different scales and from your clothes or a cup to cities. What do you think would be the role of design in cities in the future, especially given that right now cities are already so built up, that's what makes them cities, how do these principles work with that already very concrete laden infrastructure?

Neri Oxman: And the numbers are scary because it's true what you say. By 2050, we'll have 2.4 billion people added to this planet, which is equivalent to adding greater London every three months for the next 35 years, which is quite astounding. 80% of them will be living in cities. And so thinking in that context, how do we build additional buildings, but also how do we reuse, recycle, cascade, and maybe reincarnate buildings and perhaps some small scale structures will be reincarnated and become other products and other types of buildings.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: How would that work? Do you mean for different purposes?

Neri Oxman: Yeah, for example, a refugee camp that is made of biodegradable material would melt in the rain once the refugees find a safe haven, and in its place will grow a forest. And that kind of thinking about not recycling, but reincarnation. Not reuse, or cascading, which is the go-to term today in sustainable design across the board and across scales and across verticals, moving to, in my opinion, to that notion of reincarnation. The material has a soul and the soul finds expressions across scales, across different eras, well beyond our lifetime. I always say the best designs are the designs that exceed our lifetime. And if we're designing a product that is only used for our lifetime, we're probably doing the wrong thing.

Danny Lewis: After the break. How do you sell your neighbors on a sustainably designed building if they don't like the way it looks? Stick around.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: Well, what do you think of the current state of what is referred to as sustainable design? For instance, there is a tower going up on the corner of 47th and Park Avenue that's getting a lot of attention for the claims that it has special technologies to conserve water, that it has exterior materials that will reflect heat and mean that it will need less cooling. Is that state of the art?

Neri Oxman: It's state of the art in architecture. It's great and I support it. And I think it's great that we're seeing this kind of innovation. But it is still what I call compositional. Meaning let's add this for circulation, kind of bumping up the functionality of each of those objects that make up the whole. But if you think about, again, about organisms in nature, it's not really how they work. There's a nervous system that acts across the body and controls various organs of the body, et cetera. So the dream sort of looking into the future is these materials that can change their properties on the fly and become, again, from stiff to opaque, from opaque to transparent, from stiff to soft. And I always, I like to think of reducing that dimensional mismatch between the built and the grown is one that extends or allows to increase the information dimension. So think about materials as software. The more you can turn a helmet into a kind of a wearable nervous system, you could use it as an interface that gets information from your body and projects information to the cloud. And that's sort of where we're at now, sort of thinking about these links between what's in the organism and what's out there.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: And that's certainly not quite what that building is doing yet.

Neri Oxman: Not yet.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: The designer of that building, Foster and Partners is, I have to ask you about this, is also designing your new home, which is a glass penthouse on the Upper West Side. And I know it's gotten some criticism from neighbors. And what I want to ask you about that is, because you've spoken about how design can build communities. So what do you do when the community doesn't agree? What do you do when either they don't like your design or they say, "There's a difference between this is great because it's using materials that are from nature like sand to make glass" but another person looks at it and says, "I don't want to see into your living room."

Neri Oxman: Look, I think plurality of ideas and the diversity of opinions is always a good thing, But more than that, what's important is to be open. So to your question, the answer is this. We open our arms and we hug and love and hug and accept and I'd say mind and heart. So beyond truly being open to the neighbors and being receptive and welcoming, I'd say we've worked together on this and we've enjoyed the process so much. And study it for what it is. And try to understand truly the environmental benefits, the structural benefits, and the investment of knowledge and of scientific expertise that is now going into making this a reality. So I'm excited about it. And I look forward to working with our neighbors to make it a sustainable project, both environmentally, but also neighborly, so socially.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: So one of the thing hallmarks of a lot of your design is they look very organic and they are made of very organic materials, but you've spoken about how the production of them is also a computational process.

Neri Oxman: Yes.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: So, what kind of data do you use? How does the data inform what you do? And how does that work?

Neri Oxman: Yes. So every project is a little bit different, but I'd say it's sort of a combination of top down design and bottom up growth. And it really depends whether we're working with a bio-based material or not. With the glass printer, the hallmark of the project was really the technology. Before the glass printer existed we couldn't even predict the behavior of that viscous fluid mathematically or physically speaking. And what was so cool was this technology created new science. So there, the data that went into the project was all sort of centered around that end factor that we designed to enable us to spit out or to extrude the molten glass in very high temperature and high levels of control. But on the other hand, a project that began as sort of a very conceptual artistic project that asks what might living product look like and what does it mean? And because we're able to design at this incredibly high resolution that's native to the technology, in this case, the printer. we're able to either vary the elastic modulae or control the optical properties, control the chemical properties by, for example, including or incorporating fluids in the product so that it can respond to its environment. So that again, increases the dimensional space of the design space that was up until now, just X, Y, and Z. So in this case, you could start with your scan, the brain scan, or a scan of your limbs, whatever it may be and look at the resolution. And, by the way, the resolution of the printer is now 20 times the resolution of the CT scanner. So you can attach, if you're designing, let's say a wearable or a fixture to your body, that wearable could be designed as far as the scanner can see it. So you can say, "Okay, for this residual bone tissue, I want something soft. For this muscle tissue or fatty tissue, I want something stiff." And so on and so forth. So it gives you that extra resolution.

Stephanie Ilgenfritz: And we talked about scale, would technologies like this that make a product more interactive with your body, do you envision buildings, whole buildings, that are like, that people interact with physically or?

Neri Oxman: I do. It will take time. The smaller the product, the faster the translation. And that's always the case. Architecture's sort of last to celebrate. And it just takes more time. But, yeah, I think buildings over time, and we've done this with a concrete printer that was acquired by NASA a few years ago to look into printing with variable density concrete as a response to mechanical load. So, again, while the concrete is static, it's not yet dynamic. If you look at the microscale or if you look at the microscope and look at the structure of the concrete, you'll be able to identify pores that vary their size as a function of the anticipated load. So whether it's a static material that is like concrete, or whether it's a dynamic material like wood, or a bio-based material that is inoculated with bacteria, there are always opportunities to kind of hack in the intelligence of that material. What we're really interested in doing is listening to nature and trying to understand what is the language of nature. Do we know how to listen?

Danny Lewis: That's architect and designer Neri Oxman. She spoke with The Wall Street Journal's Stefanie Ilgenfritz at The Future Of Everything Festival. And we want to hear from you. Would you want to live in a biodegradable building? Let us know. We're on Twitter @WSJpodcasts. The Future Of Everything is a production of The Wall Street Journal. Stefanie Ilgenfritz is the Editorial Director of The Future Of Everything. This episode was produced by me, Danny Lewis. Jessica Fenton is our Sound Designer. Scott Saloway is our Supervising Producer, and Kateri Jochum is The Wall Street Journal's Executive Producer of Audio. Thanks for listening.