I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

A great dream of mine would be to run a design studio full of scientists who think about science as creatively as if they were doing art.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, hand-production methods were abundant. Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.

Because glass is at once structural and transparent, it is relatively easy to consider the integration of structural and environmental building performance within a single integrated skin.

In the United States alone, 450 billion square feet of glass facade is produced every year. What if we could take this chance to use the glass to harness solar energy and allow the architecture to respond to the light and heat of the sun, to create photosynthesis and generate solar energy?

Forms in nature are a byproduct of a reciprocal action between a given material and the conditions of the environment. But in architecture, the process is the direct opposite: First you decide on the form, and then you think how to build it in reality.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

There is a very beautiful expression in the Hebrew language that's borrowed from spoken Torah... 'All is predicted, and permission is given at any point to change anything.' I think I live by this idiom in the sense that there is always a goal; there is always something to look forward to in life and my creative search, and that goal is there.

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

The world of design has been subjugated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.

How can we reinterpret 3-D printing in a way that suggests a new design language?

I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.

A great dream of mine would be to run a design studio full of scientists who think about science as creatively as if they were doing art.

I often ask myself, 'What would design be like if objects were made of a single part? Would we return to a better state of creation?'

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.