Science
What if buildings could grow like trees?
A tree doesn't separate its structure from its skin. The bark is the wall, the trunk is the beam, the leaves are the solar panels. It's all one system. But when humans build things, we split everything apart: one team does the structure, another does the skin, another does the energy. Neri Oxman thinks that split is the problem.
Nature doesn't distinguish between architecture, structural engineering, and material science.— Neri Oxman
The full breakdown — the context, the shift, and a question to sit with — opens in the Insights app.
The thinker
Architect of Nature-Inspired Design
Neri Oxman is an architect, designer, and former MIT professor who pioneered material ecology, a field that combines biology, engineering, and computation to design with nature rather than against it.
Based on Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology — Neri Oxman, TED Talk, summarised and reframed by Insights.
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