At only 33 years of age, Neri Oxman’s list of accomplishments and accolades that is exhaustive. The graduate student in the School of Architecture was most recently commissioned for an exhibit, Neri Oxman: At the frontier of ecological design, currently on display at the Museum of Science here in Boston, that highlights the unique biological influence in her design. She has been variously described as an architect, engineer, biologist, and computer scientist for her work that melds these myriad disciplines. She is intelligent and thoughtful, gracious and warm, and highly photogenic as a quick google image search of her name will prove.

Although an architecture student, Oxman’s work is a thing of art.  Taking inspiration from the natural world, she transforms nature, using computer algorithms, into impossibly complex, organic, three dimensional forms.  Her models are based on the fine structure of butterfly wings, bones, cells, informed perhaps by her earlier pursuits in the field of medicine.

For example, Raycounting, featured at last year’s Design and the Elastic Mind Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resembles a cartilaginous carapace, a landscape of light and shadow created by a double curvature of its walls forming thick and thin areas of varying opacity.  It is one of Oxman’s pieces from the exhibit that are now a part of MoMA’s permanent collection.