Quotes from Neri Oxman

Although I often find that the feminist rhetoric - not feminism - can come across as simple-minded, self-regarding, nuance-averse and reductive - biology to physiology, history to psychology, procreation to gynecology, and so on - I have come to realize that we should all be feminists.

Choice is a form of compromise, no? So why choose if you can have both?

Gender is more of a continuum than we are willing to admit when we hit the restroom.

In traditional 3D printing, the gantry size poses an obvious limitation for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity.

I loathe categorization. I cherish my independence, and I treasure chivalry. I live just fine with ambiguity, and I welcome a good quarrel about all things designed or grown - except for when men misnomer 'confident' with 'poised' and 'passionate' with 'feisty.' I work hard.

Forms in nature are a byproduct of a reciprocal action between a given material and the conditions of the environment. But in architecture, the process is the direct opposite: First you decide on the form, and then you think how to build it in reality.

I am inspired by alchemy and all things continuous, uninterrupted, and effortlessly fused into wholes.

Could we design an all-glass building with internal channels and networks for airflow and water circulation? Can we surpass the great modern tradition of discrete formal and functional partitions and generate an all-in-one building skin?

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

We've managed to motion-track the silkworm's movement as it is building its cocoon. Our aim was to translate the motion-capture data into a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm in order to study the biological structure in larger scales.

Because glass is at once structural and transparent, it is relatively easy to consider the integration of structural and environmental building performance within a single integrated skin.

When I came to MIT, there were four rubrics: science, art, design, and technology. And as you entered your degree, whether it was a master's or a Ph.D., if you were a citizen in one domain, you were a traveler in the other.

It is only through hard work and awareness that we can truly own our identity.

The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions, and butterflies. We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part.

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.

Binaries aside, we are the products of our relationships with our identities - cities we have built, bodies we have embraced, kindred souls we've cherished, our memories, our dreams, the fears we hide, the pain we hold - identities that cannot be reduced to a collection of labels.

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

All great cinema has the sense of the dynamic, the transitional, mixed with the mythical and the sense of ritual.

In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.

I often ask myself, 'What would design be like if objects were made of a single part? Would we return to a better state of creation?'

Unlike a pressed or blown-glass part, which traditionally has smooth internal surface features, a printed part can have complex surface features on the inside as well as the outside.

For the same reason we have the Brad Pitts and the George Clooneys, it's just part of human nature to idolize stereotypes.