Ronald Rael | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1971 (age 54–55) Conejos County, Colorado, U.S. |
| Education | University of Colorado Boulder (BEnvD) Columbia University (MArch) |
| Occupations | Architect, artist, designer, educator |
| Awards | Beazley Design of the Year (2020); Cooper Hewitt National Design Award (2025) |
| Practice | RRAEL Studio; Rael San Fratello; Emerging Objects; Muddy Robots |
| Buildings | Teeter-Totter Wall (2019); Casa Covida (2020); Terrano (2023) |
| Website | www |
Ronald Rael (born 1971), who also works under the name RRAEL, is an American architect, artist, designer and educator. His work spans architecture, art, additive manufacturing, earthen architecture and activism at the U.S.–Mexico border. He is the founder of RRAEL Studio and of Muddy Robots, a company developing robotic construction with earth. With Virginia San Fratello he leads the design practice Rael San Fratello and the 3D printing "make-tank" Emerging Objects. He is known for the Teeter-Totter Wall (2019), which was named Beazley Design of the Year in 2020. Rael holds the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has chaired both the Department of Architecture and the Department of Art Practice.
Rael was born in 1971 in Conejos County, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley. He received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in 1998, where he received the William F. Kinne Memorial Fellowship. He worked as a designer at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam in 2001.
In 2002 Rael founded the Oakland-based studio Rael San Fratello with Virginia San Fratello. The practice describes its work as applied architectural research carried out through drawings, full-scale prototypes and built works. It was among the architects of Prada Marfa (2005), the permanent installation by Elmgreen and Dragset near Valentine, Texas, which was built of adobe. The Architectural League of New York named Rael San Fratello one of its Emerging Voices in 2014.
Rael is the co-founder of Emerging Objects, an Oakland studio he runs with San Fratello that develops 3D-printed building components, materials and software, printing with materials such as clay, cement, salt, sawdust and recycled rubber. Emerging Objects received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Digital Design in 2025. In 2019 Rael co-founded FORUST, which 3D-printed wood products from sawdust and wood waste; the company was acquired by Desktop Metal.
In 2022 Rael founded RRAEL Studio, an independent practice working across art, architecture, design and activism, with studios in La Florida, Colorado; Oakland, California; and Mexico City. In 2023 he founded Muddy Robots, based in Antonito, Colorado, which develops robotic 3D printing of buildings from raw earth as a response to housing costs and the loss of traditional building knowledge. In 2026 he founded Adobe Archipelago, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of adobe. Since 2003 he has edited the website Earth Architecture, which documents contemporary and historic building with earth.
Rael taught at Clemson University from 2002 to 2007, where he directed the Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Research and Urban Studies in Genoa, Italy, and briefly at the University of Arizona before joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008. He was named to the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture in 2017. He chaired Berkeley's Department of Architecture from 2019 to 2020 and later the Department of Art Practice, and was the first person of Latino descent to chair either department. He has been a Bakar Fellow and a Hellman Fellow at Berkeley.
Rael has worked on the U.S.–Mexico border since 2009, when his proposal "Borderwall as Infrastructure" was a finalist in the WPA 2.0 competition. His book Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.–Mexico Boundary (2017) documents the history of the wall and proposes speculative and satirical reuses of it. He presented the project in a 2019 TED talk.
In July 2019 Rael and San Fratello, working with Colectivo Chopeke, installed three pink seesaws through the steel slats of the border fence between Sunland Park, New Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez, so that children and adults on both sides could play together. The event lasted about forty minutes. The Teeter-Totter Wall was named Beazley Design of the Year for 2020 by the Design Museum in London and received the International Award for Public Art from the Institute for Public Art. Drawings of this project is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Design Museum London, and the pink teeter-totters themselves are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Albuquerque Museum.
Later border works include House Divided / Casa Dividida and House United / Casa Unida (2022), a pavilion built from 172 pieces of steel originally intended to be used to construct the border wall, shown in the exhibition A Country Is Not a House at the Arizona State University Art Museum. SFMOMA presented Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.–Mexico Border in 2021–2022.
Through Emerging Objects, Rael and San Fratello developed printable materials and building components, which they described in Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (2018). Their Cabin of 3D Printed Curiosities (2018), a backyard structure in Oakland, is clad in about 4,500 3D-printed ceramic tiles. Their 3D-printed ceramics have been shown at the Cooper Hewitt, including in The Senses: Design Beyond Vision (2018).
Much of Rael's recent work applies digital fabrication to adobe and other earthen building traditions of the Rio Grande region. Mud Frontiers (2019) and Casa Covida (2020), both in the San Luis Valley, tested 3D printing with local clay and adobe. In 2023 he founded Muddy Robots, to explore robotic earthen construction, and in 2025 formalized Muddy Robots as a company. With Muddy Robots, Rael built Terrano (2023) in Antonito, Colorado, a structure whose parabolic Nubian vault roof was printed in raw earth on site without formwork; the project has been described as the first roof 3D-printed in situ from earth. Later prototypes include Serpentine (2024), an open-air pavilion printed from earth harvested on site, and La Cas' 'e la Pompa (2025), which has one-foot-thick printed adobe walls.
For Desert X 2025 in the Coachella Valley, Rael created Adobe Oasis, a work arguing for thick earthen walls in place of layered conventional wall assemblies. Liminal (2026), commissioned by the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, reworks the museum's entrance as a series of printed earthen passages and includes a public horno.
Casa Desenterrada / Exhuming Home, made of adobe bricks, found objects, paint and wood, was shown in Making Home, the Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt (2024–2025), and in Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros at the Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center and the Harwood Museum of Art (2026–2027). Swept Away, a tower clad in traditional straw brooms, was shown at the 2025 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. In 2026 the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opened Rael San Fratello: Prototypes and Provocations, a survey of twenty years of the practice's work.
Rael's work, individually and with Rael San Fratello, is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Design Museum in London, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which holds Bad Ombrés.
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