Neri Oxman Quotes

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.

Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use.

I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching.

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It's a means of making different life forms possible.

Snohetta promotes a more democratic workplace atmosphere than most other architectural offices. This may merely reflect prevalent employment practices in Scandinavia, but Snohetta places a stronger emphasis on group participation in the design process than typical high-style firms.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.

The level of detail and craft is something that's inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

The construction of an airplane is simple compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird. If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.