Architect Neri Oxman, creator of ‘material ecology,’ explains how silkworms, shrimp shells and insect exoskeletons could help shape the city of the future.
4 min
While the pandemic heightened speculation about what the city of the future will look like, architect Neri Oxman says she is sticking with a blueprint based on a core principle of her work: In years to come, buildings will be grown, not built.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab from 2010 to 2021, Ms. Oxman founded and directed the Mediated Matter group, a team researching in areas including computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology. There, she created a field she calls material ecology.
The result? A body of work that includes a pavilion spun by 6,500 silkworms (with the help of a robotic arm), a series of 3D-printed sculptures filled with liquid channels of the pigment melanin (which she envisions could be used in the façades of buildings to protect against ultraviolet rays), and a collection of artifacts constructed using materials derived from shrimp shells and insect exoskeletons.
Since leaving academia, Ms. Oxman, 46 years old, has focused on Oxman, the New York-based design and technology company that she founded in 2020 with the aim of applying her design philosophy to real-world projects. A retrospective of her work is on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Wall Street Journal spoke to Ms. Oxman about the future of urban architecture and how she thinks design can be used as a tool to fight climate change.
The idea behind material ecology is to enable total synergy between grown and built environments by deploying new digital technologies that allow us to augment bio-based materials for large-scale construction.
It comes down to ethics and availability. We work with the most abundant biopolymers on the planet which include cellulose, found in plant cell walls; pectin, found in apple and lemon skins; and chitin, found in the shells of crustaceans.
Using technology, we can program biomaterials to degrade in response to changing environmental conditions. At MIT, we built three biopolymer pavilions [the Aguahoja pavilions] which, instead of concrete, were built using shrimp shells, fallen leaves and apple skins. We programmed the pavilions to decay at a certain point when exposed to rainwater. This, in turn, nurtures soil microorganisms to fuel new growth.
It’s a circular economy of material that could be used to create biodegradable refugee camps, for example. Once the refugees find a safe haven, the camps would be programmed to melt away in the rain.
It’s complex. When we combine biopolymers including chitosan, pectin and cellulose, the material’s ability to absorb water varies based on its composition. Chitosan, for example, is naturally water-resistant and doesn’t readily dissociate when submerged, while pectin is hydrophilic and dissolves rapidly. By choosing how we blend these components, we can access a spectrum of hydrophilicity—otherwise known as a material’s affinity to water—and this lets us tune or program the speed at which a material breaks down. In essence, we are designing the architectural equivalent of metabolic rate.
For grown buildings to appear in towns and cities, we need to rethink mass production, and this will take five to 10 years to happen in a meaningful way. However, the development of products made from biological materials—cars, for example—could begin within the next year.
The architect and professor Carl Elefante says that “the greenest building is one that is already built.” That’s because the carbon emitted during construction is vast compared to the operating emissions of a given building. We therefore need to find new ways to augment the pre-existing built environment rather than trying to completely rebuild our cities from the ground up.
We need to look at a range of interventions. One is the creation of bioengineered façades for existing buildings. An example: in the U.S. alone, hundreds of billions of square feet of glass façade components are produced every year. As part of our research at MIT, we 3D-printed glass augmented with synthetically engineered microorganisms to produce energy [from the sun]. This allows us to develop solar-harnessing glass façades that can act as a skin for pre-existing buildings.
We must also think about whole-building recycling. A current example is Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The campus was built by Norman Foster using materials from old buildings that used to be on the same site. Rather than simply destroying structures when we no longer have use for them, we must look for ways to augment them using new technology and intelligence.
The architect of the future is interested in formation, as much as she is interested in form. She is a systems thinker, interested in building relationships between objects rather than seeing them as standalone. She invents new technologies with which to design, manufacture and build. She is a gardener, not a master planner
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: April 10, 2022.
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
