The Vilcek Prize in Design

2014  Melissa Milgrom, METROPOLIS, April 2014

From the website: Oxman believes that the processes and patterns inspired by nature—what she calls “material ecology”—provide a road map for the future. Her projects include a silk pavilion that uses silkworms to spin the canopy. Drawing from her training at Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, the designer studies, for instance, the spongy formations in bones, to create organic forms that can be 3-D printed or machine made. “Oxman strikes me as someone with firm roots and tastes as a naturalist, and with a talent and passion for employing advanced technologies to capture the strengths and beauty of nature and design living environments like no one has done before,” says renowned cancer researcher Joan Massagué. For Oxman, all colors exist in the gray of ambiguity. “To be able to live a full life in Israel, one must live at relative ease with situations of social and personal ambiguity. It is a country filled with contradictions and ideologies, but it is also where I experienced my childhood. Design, too, is about finding clarity where there appears to be none, and creating experiences and solutions that seem inevitable once they are created.”