Emerging Voices winner profile
Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab
The Architectural League’s Emerging Voices program annually spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Neri Oxman of the Mediated Matter Group at MIT’s Media Lab is a 2015 winner of the award.
Neri Oxman founded the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab in 2010. Concerned with “nature-inspired design and design-inspired nature,” the group conducts research at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials, and synthetic biology and “applies that knowledge to design across scales from the micro scale to the building scale.” Oxman coined the term Material Ecology to describe her research area, offering methods for the generation of informed relations between form, material, structure, and the environment across scales and application domains. Past group projects include Cartesian Wax and Raycounting from the Material Ecology Project, exhibited in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MoMA, and the Silk Pavilion, a cocoon-like dome digitally co-fabricated with 6,500 silkworms. Ongoing projects include the Ocean Pavilion and the Glass Pavilion demonstrating, for the first time, large-scale robotic fabrication of crustacean-derived materials and glass, respectively.
Visit the 2015 Emerging Voices online feature to learn more about all eight of this year’s winning firms.