Acclaimed designer Neri Oxman, who helped Francis Ford Coppola dream up the eponymous urban development, has been at the center of multiple recent controversies.
, Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing box office flop, a futuristic development is the wild utopic imagining of Adam Driver’s protagonist Cesar Catilina, a controversial urbanist who’s invented a newfangled building material called Megalon. To conjure the film’s striking biomorphic cityscape, the directed worked with Neri Oxman, a lauded 48-year-old Israeli-American interdisciplinary designer known for her practice in “material ecology.
Oxman, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Centre Pompidou and who previously collaborated with Bjork on a 3D-printed mask that externalized the singer’s musculoskeletal system during a performance, says on herthat she drew inspiration for the film’s utopian citycape from from Manhattan’s pre-colonial pastoral past: “Hills are the remains of skyscrapers and valleys follow the streets of the city grid.
‘s request to discuss her work on the film, posed with Coppola on the New York City red carpet of the Sept. 23premiere. She also has a brief yet pivotal role in the film as a physician. “Most of Dr. Shira and the science behind the Megalon left on the cutting room floor,” her husband, billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman, wrote on social media afterward.
Ackman, a prominent critic of DEI initiatives and self-styled Big Ideas man, is himself an outsized figure right out of Coppola’s New Rome. His advocacy campaign to remove Harvard’s then-president over plagiarism allegations ricocheted this year to Oxman apologizing for citation errors in her own PhD dissertation.
While it’s unclear when Coppola engaged Oxman on the project, the recent brushes she and her husband had with scandal are unlikely to have bothered the director — perhaps the opposite. He made it clear in the run-up to therelease that he purposely chose to work with people on this project who’d been, to his mind, “canceled,”One of the Best 4K Ultra Short-Throw Projector TVs Is On Sale During Amazon Fall Prime Day — Here’s Why It’s Worth Buying.
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