Neri Oxman

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

I believe in the balance between dreaming and building.

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?

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.

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.

Our facial skins are thin with large pores; our back skins are thicker with small pores. One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier. And yet, it's the same skin, no parts, no assemblies. It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity.

Look at spiders. They use about eight different properties of silk for different functions. The spider is like a multimaterial 3D printer.

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.

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 grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.

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?'

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.