Her experimental designs are the result of an imaginative leap she made nearly 20 years ago: what if you could grow a building?
-printed glass, with columns engineered to capture solar energy by acting as optical lenses. Or a tent-like shelter for those without a roof, programmed to decay when no longer needed . Consider a pavilion built from glass imbued with melanin, which shifts from light to dark and back again, regulating the temperature and shade inside.
Ms Oxman studied medicine for two years in her native Israel before switching to architecture, first at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, then at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, before completing a doctorate in computational design at. She credits her medical studies in biology and chemistry with helping inspire her unusual approach to architecture.
“symbiosis between the built and the natural environment,” she says. Yet if it is designers who “messed up” the environment, she says, it is their responsibility today to reshape “how we think about material reality…clothing, artefacts, products, cars, airplanes, rockets and, of course, buildings and cities.”