Norman Foster interviews Neri Oxman: how to turn a mindset into a workspace

Norman Foster: You and I met some years ago in MIT’s Media Lab, where you were already undertaking some extraordinary work. Could you talk about what you were doing then and how your work has evolved since?
Neri Oxman: Of course. I was a faculty member at MIT’s Media Lab between 2010 and 2020. Since then, my team and I have been developing a new company that – in many ways – is a continuation of a decade of “training.” I would say that the challenge, and the opportunity, of this upcoming chapter has been translating our research principles, methods, and technologies from academia to practice, as well as generating new ideas that can be scaled and deployed in the real world.

I have always been drawn to a nature-centric approach to architectural design and construction. For example, in our group at the Media Lab, the Mediated Matter Group, we had created a set of protocols – a Manual for Spaceship Nature – for augmenting the natural world through the tools and technologies we invented. Some were inspired by the natural world, some were informed by the natural world, and some were engineered by the natural world. Now, we are taking the work to another level, shifting our focus from the dissemination of knowledge and principles to the dissemination of product and impact, applied across three domains: product design, architectural and urban design, and molecular design. These are distinct fields operating at different scales, but they are all underpinned by the core tenet of doing basic research as part of the design practice, which is essential to all that we do.

When I visited your new lab, it was so fantastically multivalent. I remember saying that the mixture of environments would make a great setting for a science fiction movie. Could you talk about those spaces and the kind of functions or explorations that they serve?
It was a joy and an honour to work with you and your team to transform a 1920s structural skeleton into a Bell Lab-inspired studio that now supports a range of highly technical functions – such as grow rooms and tissue culture labs – within a minimalist design language that reflects the company’s philosophy.

Neri Oxman

At MIT, we used to introduce our work in the context of a framework that we called the “Krebs Cycle of Creativity.” Its name was inspired by the biological Krebs Cycle, the basis of all metabolic processes in nature. This cycle became a metaphor to explain and express how, in our lab – at MIT and now at OXMAN – we move through a circle that includes art, science, engineering, and design, where the output for one domain becomes the input for another: science converts information into knowledge; engineering takes that knowledge and turns it into utility; design takes utility and places it within a cultural and environmental context; and art considers those shifts in context and reimagines them. At this moment, when art meets science, units of perception unite with units of information – art informs science – and the cycle closes at midnight, the “Cinderella” moment. 

Our goal was to establish that way of thinking in built form, in the design of our new lab. The challenge was to preserve the capacity for cross-pollination between domains while allowing sufficient latitude for researchers to occupy that space and generate novelty within and outside their disciplines, through design. Indeed, upon the very first encounter with the space, one can almost inhabit that diagram. It is, as we hoped, a living system of interrelations between researchers, robots, and organisms.

We have a design atelier on the ninth floor. The main space opens up to the tenth floor, where a wet lab on the west side connects to a robotic “cell” on the east. Across the corridor, to the south, is a machine shop overlooking the Hudson River. And so, by entering the space, you enter a cross-disciplinary schema where a single individual at any given time can occupy the architectural space, the biological-engineering space, and the robotic space nearly simultaneously. One can flow between domains rather than travelling across distinct buildings zoned as machine shops or wet labs. Ours is a single space where all three modalities coexist, physically and intellectually.

I remember in 2019, when we were first designing the wet lab, I thought we should pursue something bold: we should open the possibility of growing multiple bacterial strains simultaneously, within a single space. One converts light into sugar and the other converts sugar into matter. That was the kind of thinking driving the wet lab’s design. As you may know, a wet lab often focuses on and contains a single strain, say E. coli or cyanobacteria. We wanted to account for a wide array of organisms, as well as the products we would later design by and with them.

I recall dropping a Ferrari 250 GT SWB car model in the floor plan, forcing us to think about the wet lab’s space flexibly. From there, we began the conversation about the adaptation and mobility of the functional elements versus the rigour, sharpness, the monastic nature of the spaces, both of which were of equal significance to us. We are – by the way – one of a few labs in inner New York City zoned for a biosafety level 2+ (BL2+) wet lab. We were lucky to have been able to build a BL2 lab, which can be upgraded to level 3 or 4. Additionally, the original building was designed in 1927 for an automobile company and, with its tall ceilings and open plan, could be adapted to serve our way of thinking – a rare and exciting opportunity from an architectural point of view.

The building supports 25 different types of services for the labs. It has 109 kilometres of data cables, 420 kilowatts of backup power, 40,000 cubic feet per minute of air handling, and 400,000 British thermal units of heating and cooling. It is a machine. But it is also highly considered. The dimensions of the oak furnishings, for example, are correlated with the dimensions of the wet lab tables, every unit in conversation with the others across material and function. It all works together; everything uses the same grammar.

I was thinking as I visited that it was like moving through the innards of an ocean liner, or behind the skin of an aircraft. Can you give insight into some of the projects that are coming out of this facility?
Our workflow is guided by the three interlinked domains that I mentioned earlier: the architectural-urban scales, the product scale, and the molecular scale. Each scale is allocated its own space within the lab, meaning that a project designed to address multiple scales will inhabit a unique route through the lab. For example, the molecular scale is based in the wet lab, the architectural scale is based in the architectural atelier, and the product scale is explored in the robotic cell. This tripartite structure also relates to the three mechanisms for nature-centric design.

Neri Oxman

The first is co-production (with nature); that is the product scale. The second is cohabitation (with nature); that is the architectural-urban scale. And the third is communication (with nature); and that is the molecular scale. In each of those scales and each of those “co’s” with nature, we seek to reinvent both processes and technologies that are designed, built, and deployed at those very scales. Let me provide three examples. On the product scale, we have been considering the textile industry, an immensely unsustainable one due to land use, carbon emissions, waste, microplastics, and so on. So, we have been testing material alternatives that can biodegrade programmatically, or “on demand”, and be grown by bacteria. We have finally completed an automated, vertically integrated bio-digital fabrication and production system to enable the end-to-end life cycle design of textiles and products using these materials. The textiles produced in this way contain zero microplastics. They begin and end with bacteria and thus propel us beyond the realm of recycling to express the concept of reincarnation within the product design world: a shoe biodegrades into a fruit-giving tree, a tree befalls a shoe.

Then there is the architectural-urban scale. Related to this scale, we are developing a suite of computational tools, rooted in AI, generative optimisation, and machine learning, that enable us to reprogram a building site as a thriving ecology. At the moment, we are applying the lens of “environmental deep learning” to rethink the design of towers and data centres, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. Those two are some of the most energy-consuming typologies in cities, typologies that engender considerable tension between community, planners, and the large companies that own or lease the land. So, we ask, how can the heat derived from a data centre serve the ecology upon which it is constructed, and increase the rate of carbon sequestration, for example? Is there a world in which the existence of a data centre or a tower allows us to sink more carbon than we would in the absence of the typology on the site? It might take decades to realise, but we are excited to operate at such a scale, intersecting master planning, computational design, and ecological engineering.

Our computational tools can also be applied to the molecular scale, such that we can examine the metagenomics of a construction site, its soil microecology, its biodiversity index, and carbon fingerprint. We also research the history and culture of the site in the context of ancient and indigenous communities, resisting the insular view that a site is a vacant entity, devoid of environmental and cultural history that can today – with the help of technologies from drones to metagenomic site analysis – be discovered, quantified, and addressed at high resolution. In fact, we know that a space is always alive with information – that is, the presence or absence of specific molecules. 

This means a project that begins on the architectural-urban scale also carries a “molecular profile”. We combine these elements into an algorithm or a set of algorithms that let us analyse the site and then develop what we call an “ecological program” for that site. At the heart of ecological programming is the notion that a building cannot be solely human-centric, that a building or a set of buildings must accommodate multiple species across kingdoms and scales.

Neri Oxman

We test our ecological programs upstairs in the wet lab in a set of custom, controlled environment rooms we call the “capsules”. Space-time capsules, if you will. We can grow microecologies here at the room scale, mirroring ancient ecologies and engineering future ones – working in miniature towards a macroscopic goal. The algorithm then determines which plant should be placed next to which other plant to increase ecological services, for example, or increase carbon sequestration, thermal buffering, phytoremediation, whatever the objective function is. And we study the relationships between these organisms and the health, stability and activity of their ecosystems, iterating on the microenvironment composition and conditions to achieve the maximum positive environmental impact. In one capsule, we are growing plants that are remnants of the forest ecology that existed in New York City in 1609, when Henry Hudson stepped onto the island, and way before, when the Lenape people were here. That was a thriving and incredibly biodiverse ecology. And what we’re doing is re-enlivening that ecology, ultimately rewilding some of these environments in New York City and recovering the biodiversity and resilience these places once knew. In a sense, the capsules may be considered “biodiversity solvers”. They enable us to engage as designers with elements in the environment that require a different set of tools and sensitivities along with a cross-disciplinary worldview.

Fascinating. I wonder how that works at the level of the team. Years ago, when we met, I remember you and your colleagues around a piano. And when I visited the lab, I found you at an immense table with everybody grouped around it. Can you talk about how you work as an enterprise, as a creative unit?
There’s still a piano! Like the one you saw years ago but older, crafted with care in Steinway’s Hamburg factory back in 1929 and refurbished by an artist-engineer who lives in Hell’s Kitchen, across the street from our lab. We gather as a community to listen, to learn from and to celebrate one another through music, dance and design. That touches the heart of what we are trying to achieve here; it’s not only about long-term systems-view change. It’s also about team-building and culture: think Bauhaus in the age of synthetic biology. 

The lab is for us a home, a research institution, a studio, a design hub, a space for movement and play, a community space, all of the above. The structure of the company and the structure of the space are closely aligned. And the structure of thinking, too, is always evolving through the space. I have always admired your and Buckminster Fuller’s collaborations, and that famous line: “How much does your building weigh, Mr Foster?” And in an age of bio-design, perhaps we should also ask: “How much does your building sink?” There is a huge paradigm shift happening across industries, and it’s exciting to place ourselves at the intersection of it all. Working together allows us to approach these questions with a high degree of versatility. That is a wonderful note. I love the interactive nature of the environment, the organisation, the projects and the way that one feeds the other. Collaboration is key in approaching this interdependence – and it grows increasingly important in today’s accelerated, interconnected world.

Opening image: The new laboratory of Neri Oxman. Photo Nicholas Calcott. Courtesy OXMAN.