By Mara Veitch
To spend an afternoon with Neri Oxman is to find yourself on a sort of acid trip. Your guide is an MIT professor with a mane of dark hair and a bright, cheery disposition. In her presence, reality, with its brute force and clumsy machinery, fades away entirely, and a new world rises up in its place, one in which homes are woven by teams of silkworms, skyscrapers can breathe, and airplanes aren’t built from parts, but are “grown, like organs.” This is the world of Neri Oxman: unimaginable feats of design and engineering are not simply realized, they exist as mesmerizing objects of art that represent a future most of us can barely fathom.