This is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.

Hi, Rebels! This is Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, the interview.

I'm your host, Taya Diggs, and today we're talking to Neri Oxman, who read us the story of architect Zaha Hadid.

It's an awesome episode, so go take a listen if you haven't already.

Neri, can you please introduce yourself?

My name is Neri, Neri Oxman. I am an architect, inventor, and a professor at MIT, where I had a research group focused on the building materials of the future and the technologies to create them.

Our main inspiration in the group is the natural world, and our motivation is to create materials, structures, systems, and buildings

that emulate and even collaborate with the natural and the biological world.

Examples include structures that have been three-dimensionally printed by glass

that act as giant optical lenses, a building facade that is infused with biological pigments

offering protection from sunlight, a wearable device designed to convert sunlight into biofuel, a little bit like a

wearable plant, and a five-meter-tall tower made from the most abundant biopolymers on our planet,

which were sourced from shrimp shells, from apple skins, and from fallen leaves.

Where does your passion for architecture and design come from?

Is it something that you were interested in as a kid?

I was fortunate to live and to breathe architecture throughout my life

from the time I was a very, very young child. Both of my parents practiced and taught architecture

and my grandfather was an important civil engineer in Haifa, Israel,

where I was born and raised.

One thing that stands out about Zaha's story is how often she was the only woman in the room.

Is this something you've experienced in the architecture world?

Indeed, I have experienced the gender divide myself.

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