Cartesian Wax -- adaptable materials

Neri Oxman is careful not to use traditional terms like "architecture" or "material science" to refer to her work. Instead, she calls it "material ecology," a nod to her belief that design is as much about the work's relationship to and participation in its local environment as it is about the form of the object itself. Oxman finds inspiration in biology; the forms in her work often mimic those found in nature. She doesn't believe biomimicry is a passing fad: "The biological world," she says, "is displacing the machine as a general model of design."

Oxman's "Cartesian Wax" is a material designed to replicate the multiple functionalities of living tissue. It uses a combination of flexible and rigid resin to create a building "skin" that evokes living matter and responds to its local environment; its transparency level is modulated based on local heat and light conditions. The work was inspired by Descartes's Wax Argument: Descartes argued that because we can identify wax as wax, even when its physical properties change in the presence of heat, we know our mind has an important role exceeding that of our limited senses.