(Photo by starzfly/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)NEW YORK, NY - JULY 19: Brad Pitt seen in Manhattan on July 19, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Alex B. Huckle/GC Images)NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 26: Brad Pitt seen out in Tribeca on November 26, 2015 in New York, New York.

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“But I believe the influence, more than the immediate application, is where its importance resides,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the department of architecture and design at MoMA. (If she could, she says, she would live in a white cube.) (Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 24: Brad Pitt is seen at LAX on July 24, 2016 in Los Angeles, California.

But over time, I’ve come to realize there is a spiritual magical quality about her'—Bill AckmanSoon Ackman was regularly visiting Oxman in Cambridge. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Netflix)HOLLYWOOD, CA - APRIL 05: Brad Pitt arrives at the Premiere Of Amazon Studios' 'The Lost City Of Z' at ArcLight Hollywood on April 5, 2017 in Hollywood, California. “She taught me how to count clouds, pick mushrooms, and press flowers,” Oxman says of her. Oxman often spent time at her grandmother’s house nearby, which was engulfed by a garden. “It has become increasingly challenging to differentiate between the man-made and the nature-grown,” she says, her hands loosely cupped around her belly. (She envisions, one day, buildings with a facade made from a 3-D-printed continuous layer of glass that both controls the temperature of the interior and harnesses solar energy.) “Give me Fellini, and I’m on it,” she says.

The space is launching with special projects that transcend technical concerns to touch on spiritual notions. (Photo by Jacopo Raule/Getty Images for Lexus)MILAN, ITALY - APRIL 03: Neri Oxman attends Lexus Yet during Milan Design Week 2017 on April 3, 2017 in Milan, Italy.

She is known for art and architecture that combine design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. (Photo by Essdras M Suarez/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)NEW YORK CITY, NY - JANUARY 12: Neri Oxman attends EARTH AWARDS Gala at The Four Seasons on January 12, 2009 in New York City.

(Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)BEVERLY HILLS, CA - JANUARY 08: In this handout photo provided by NBCUniversal, presenter Brad Pitt onstage during the 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 8, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California.

(Photo by Robert Kamau/GC Images)LE MANS, FRANCE - JUNE 18: Actor Brad Pitt attends the start of the 84th Le Mans 24-hours endurance race on June 18, 2016 in Le Mans, France. She has a flower press (which isn’t necessarily highbrow, but does make her sound like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel).

Molly Langmuir is a freelance writer and former staff writer for ELLE. Scroll to continue with content Even as a child, she had an inborn sense of equanimity.

(Photo by starzfly/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)NEW YORK, NY - JULY 21: Actor Brad Pitt is seen coming out of a hotel in Soho on July 21, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 21: Brad Pitt is seen at LAX on June 21, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. Since then her acclaim has only grown. “He was going to make it there anyway,” she says. (Photo: Philippe Cheng) (Photo: Philippe Cheng) Follow us on Instagram ( @slowdown.tv ) and Twitter ( @time__sensitive ), and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. “I sat for three hours and drew and drew, and I just fell in love with the idea of entering architecture school,” she says.

(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for HFA)LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 24: Brad Pitt is seen the set of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood on July 24, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 06: Brad Pitt attends the 7th Annual Sean Penn & Friends HAITI RISING Gala benefiting J/P Haitian Relief Organization on January 6, 2018 in Hollywood, California.

)“People regularly fall in love with Neri,” he says. Her drawers, everything.” Scouted on a bus, Oxman did some modeling in her teens, then was drafted at age 18 into the Israeli Air Force, where she served for nearly three years. “Nearly everything we create is part of the natural ecology and interacts with the ecology,” Oxman tells me in her lab, which that day is filled with students and bikes, and has shelves displaying items both natural and man- made. Oxman, who speaks in a way that’s poetic yet enigmatic, and who describes her students as being like her family and herself as “an introvert doing a really good job in public,” comes off as passionate but not easily perturbed. He’d contacted her after two friends, one of whom was former 'I called her Miss Too Good to Be True for a while. But last spring, a piece by Oxman and her team was displayed there—a five-meter-tall structure called As Oxman asks in her TED Talk, “So why are we still designing with plastics?” She meant the question rhetorically, but later I ask her why she thought we The first thing Oxman tells me when we meet in the lobby of the Media Lab a few hours after her talk is that the night before, during a bout of pregnancy-related insomnia, she had practiced her presentation, only to discover onstage that due to a technological glitch, her slides rotated through faster than usual. “Good question.”) And she’ll continue pushing forward with other projects as well, including a series of 3-D- printed pieces, called Oxman imagines the pigment could one day be incorporated into buildings’ exteriors, enabling structures to have a “skin” that tans in the sun. (Photo by starzfly/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - MARCH 31: Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt seen filming scenes for 'Five Seconds Of Silence in Hampstead on March 31, 2016 in London, England. Has her appearance ever led people to discount her intelligence?