Neri Oxman

In the MIT Media Lab's basement workshop sits a machine that can slice human bone instantly using a blast of water mixed with garnet dust. It's Neri Oxman's favorite. "The laser cutter is very feminine, elegant. The water-jet cutter is very masculine. It cuts anything. To be here at 2 a.m. all by myself -- it's really exciting!" This laughing, chic young woman in a flowing Helmut Lang jacket is an artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist, and designer who is not just making new things but also coming up with new ways to make things.

"The boundaries separating architecture, product design, and art are fuzzy at the best of times, and Neri's work fuzzes them some more," says MIT professor Bill Mitchell. "She doesn't really fit neatly into any of the standard professional categories -- and it's one of her strengths that she doesn't." The daughter of two architects, the 33-year-old Oxman studied medicine at Hebrew University; attended the Technion, Israel's world-class technical institute; and then graduated from the Architectural Association in London, where Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas both studied. She came to MIT in 2006 on a Presidential Fellowship, based in the computation group of the architecture department. There, Oxman draws on every strand of her impressively diverse background, using software to generate novel composite materials.

In Oxman's home studio, some wooden crates have arrived from Seville, Spain, fresh from the International Biennial. Most of her models -- in metal, wood, or rubbery resins -- require verbal as well as physical unpacking. "The Beast" is a chaise longue molded of 21 different materials of varying strength and springiness; it is designed to fit her body like a carapace. "Construction in Vivo," a collaboration with A. John Hart at the University of Michigan (creator of the "nanobama" presidential microportraits), is a method for making walls out of carbon nanotubes that morph seamlessly into pillars or windows; they thicken where they need to bear weight, or thin to let in light. "I believe that in 50 years, buildings will be like biological tissues," Oxman says. An upcoming commission from Boston's Museum of Science is a wrist brace for carpal-tunnel sufferers (Oxman has the syndrome in both hands) customized to restrict the particular angles of motion that cause pain to each individual, as determined by motion-capture software similar to that used by animators.

"We're playing God a little bit," Oxman says. "We're taking a bunch of environmental constraints and throwing them into computational software and letting the computer generate the form for us." It's biomimicry, but instead of aping nature's forms, she's trying to imitate its processes. One of her working metaphors is bone: The same rods of calcium phosphate grow stronger to support extra weight during pregnancy, or get slighter when astronauts spend time in zero gravity. For example, she's seeking a patent on a new kind of 3-D printer that can combine two materials in a single object -- and change material properties as it's printing, "as if you were printing your own bone structure and modifying the density of the bone to fit the structural load."

The combination of high concept and live, seductive forms makes it tempting to see Oxman's work as art. No less an authority than Paola Antonelli, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art who has acquired many of Oxman's pieces and included her in last year's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, says it's more than that: "What was amazing about this work is that it uses the computer to transform the secrets of nature into algorithms, and in a biomimetic way to try to use the same stratagems nature uses."

Eventually, Oxman wants to have her own lab where she can oversee an interdisciplinary team in both research and practice. Her innovations are, after all, essentially computer-controlled manufacturing processes, so in some sense she needs to see her ideas play out on an industrial scale and in the marketplace. Still, she knows her work will always be a little out there. "I like to be on the edge because it makes me vulnerable. On the fringes, I think, is where disruptive innovation begins." -- by Anya Kamenetz