Neri Oxman

And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.

which is an epic term that means like is whatever is the biological living system that's uh doing the creation and that's what's happening in pharma and and biomaterials and by the way precision ag and and and food new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is the sort of how i think of it and and and and the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or or it's a

It's the mycelium.

There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad.

And it's cellulose or it's, you know, fake bananas or the workhorse E. coli.

But these hero organisms are being bedded on as like the...

what's the one answer that solves everything?

Hitchhiker's Guide?

These are sort of the 42s of the enchanted new universe.

And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony.

And let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale.

And those usually were pavilions.

So each of these silkworm threads are about one mile in distance, and they're beautiful.

And just thinking about the amount of material, it's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary tissue

vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form.

It's just, nature is amazing.

But back to the silkworms, I think I had three months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how, we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over the period of 24 to 72 hours.

And it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself.

It's a beautiful form of architecture.

And it uses pretty much just two materials, two chemical compounds, sericin and fibrin.