We met with with Ronald Rael,an architect, an artist, an educator, and now a Curious 100 honoree to discuss his work, his background, and some of where he hopes to go in the future. Read the full transcript of the interview here.
Angelika Ingham We know your work to be concerned with the border wall, with earthen materials, and with cutting edge technology. We're curious how you would define your own work.
Ronald Rael You know, I always talk about contextualizing my work under this concept of an expanded borderlands. There's a geographic territory that we call the borderlands, but it could be wider and more encompassing. It extends, in my opinion, from the contemporary US Mexican border to the border that existed prior to the Mexican American war. I think of the borderlands as a hybrid condition where things come together and things come apart. So pushing technologies together is one way of thinking about the borderlands as a hybrid laboratory for design. And one of the materials of the borderlands is earth. So I kind of see that as the thread that comes through it. Those might be seen as different topics, but I see them as under the same umbrella of this idea.
AI Then, would you say you’re interested in conditions of overlap and friction?
RR Yeah, overlap and friction or paradoxes. We could define the border as a place that separates two things, whether it's countries or languages or people, but we can also think about borders as a place where things come together. When they do, they come together in remarkable ways or violent ways or beautiful ways. And then there's also a melding of that. There's also the idea that sometimes things are torn apart. And what does that mean: to pull things apart? And what's revealed when things are pulled apart?
AI As you mentioned, things like adobe or earthen materials and 3D printing might seem at odds with each other, but can actually engage each other very naturally. I'm curious how you feel about other newly-arising technologies, such as artificial intelligence. How you see these things being connected to your work. Do you want to engage with them?
RR I do engage with them, and I'm very excited about them. I've lately started to put my work under the umbrella of three AIs. One is “artificial intelligence”. I love it for image production, and now you can do geometry production. Another is “additive intelligence”. There are many ways that I've worked over the years to think about how additive manufacturing contributes to the making of design. The final, or maybe the first, is “ancestral intelligence” and how you bring it into the fold of this conversation. Taking knowledge that's 10,000 years old and combining it with new forms of knowledge, to me, is exciting. It's another hybrid moment that exists at that frontier, that borderland of innovation.
AA A lot of your work is focused on this extended borderland, sort of the Southwestern United States. What is your personal relationship to this land?
RR I'm from the territory that was once the historic border between The United States and Mexico. And, my family's lived in that region for thousands of years. So those legacies of colonization and border shifts have been part of my making. The San Francisco Bay Area, where I live and work today, is also part of that historic borderland. We can go to the Presidio and see adobe buildings. We see also those layers of violence and colonization and militarization that define the borderlands. So whether you're at the contemporary US Mexico border where a wall represents a form of militarization of the border, or you come here and you see the Presidio and the historic militarization of the border, it is evident in these borderlands. This is part of everyone's reality who lives in these borderlands, whether we engage it or ignore it.
AI Certainly. I think it's true as you stated that places of tension, like scorched earth, are often most fertile. You bring a really poignant element of joy and play to all of your work. How integral is that curious, joyful streak to your work? How is it tied to exploration? And what is your opinion on its importance, or lack of importance, to design in general?
RR A lot of people ask me that question about play, and I never think I have a good answer. But I wanna try a new answer. Part of my work has always crossed the border between two disciplines, the discipline of design and the discipline of art. And many people ask me how I distinguish those two worlds. I always think that design is full of responsibility— it has responsibility to clients, to communicating instructions to builders, to safety. Art doesn't have any responsibilities. It can actually be free. So at the intersection of design and art is this beautiful opportunity to play. I love being in that space where you can experiment and unleash ideas with complete freedom and abandon, without the burden of responsibility. Then there's that moment where you have to cross the line all the way back to the other side to say, “okay, now this is what the outcome of those investigations is responsible for.” Back and forth. That's exciting to me: just crossing the border between those two worlds.
AI I’d like you to speak to your last statement about whether you feel like an artist or a designer first, if either, or even chronologically in your life, if you felt like one before the other.
RR Yeah. I don't really categorize myself. I'm very shy to call myself an artist. But also there's, like, legalities around calling oneself an architect. So that's again about responsibility in play. Right? And titles and disciplines and silos. And I guess I feel more liberated from those kinds of titles.
AI It seems clear that you're influenced by many ideas, you're an educator and you engage with the community and with a lot of collaborators. Who have some of your most significant collaborators been and how do multiple veins of thought play into your work?
RR I've actually never thought I was good at working with communities. I was really a fan of, still am, of places like the Rural Studio, for example, who’re deeply invested in community. Early in my teaching career, I thought I'd love to be the next Samuel Mockbee. And, you know, Samuel Mockbee had a particular, magnanimous persona and way of engaging people that allowed him to do that. And I felt that, but I’m no Samuel Mockbee. But I think just finding ways to integrate into communities and allowing communities to lead has been the best way I’ve been able to work with them— You know, Rural Studio definitely took a position. A big institution said, “We’re building a house. We’re giving it to you.” I think my approach has been around much more casual, invited, accidental ways of working.
For example the Teeter Totter Wall project. I was doing a project with a gallery in El Paso, and I met someone who came because they were interested in the 3D-printed earth, and they were part of an organization in Juárez doing really interesting activism work. They asked me, “Should we do something together?” And I said, “Well, I have this idea of a teeter totter,” and all I wanted to do was build it with them. I just wanted to build the object. So we started doing that together and coming up with ideas, and then getting to know the community there, it all kind of unfolded in a really accidental way. Ultimately, it was as informal as one day, I said to a bunch of kids, “Hey, what do you think if we put, like, a teeter totter in the wall here and we could play together on both sides?” And they were like, “That’d be cool.” So we did it.
So I think those are the ways. But, you know, because of the visibility of that project—and here’s the thing about responsibility and play—that project isn’t responsible for anything. It will never be a solution to any of the problems that arise because of immigration, but it’s allowed me, through other invitations, to do really meaningful projects in migrant shelters along the U.S.–Mexico border and work with communities there. Projects that aren’t very visible, that are about design and working with the communities in the shelter. And those are the more meaningful projects to me.
AI What are some of those projects?
RR One of them, for example, is a project done with an organization called the American Refugee Committee—they’re called Alight now. It’s about bringing and improving hospitality in migrant shelters. I built mud ovens with them. Mud ovens are a traditional cooking technology that exists throughout the Americas. And so to invite people from the community to do that—there’s a lot of familiarity. I can come into a migrant shelter and ask anyone about mud ovens, and whether they’re from Mexico, or the Caribbean, or even Russia—there are people from all over the world in migrant shelters in Mexico—they’re like, “Yeah, we understand fire. We understand cooking. We understand making ovens with mud.” and these stories start to come out. Everybody starts talking about it—about the recipes, and what’s cooked in the fire. And so that’s really fun and meaningful.
AI You’re building the hearth—the heart of the home.
RR Building the heart. Yeah. Building the hearth.
AI You say you’re building an environment of hospitality. What is the heart of hospitality to you?
RR It’s really about using design to improve the lives and the comfort of children. So improving places where toddlers can be and play. Improving the landscape of design on the grounds of the shelter.
AI Do you feel like that’s accomplished spatially, or much more through this shared tradition—this feeling of familiarity?
RR Probably through both. I mean, definitely one has to feel comfortable, and there’s a spatial element to comfort, and there’s also a social element to comfort. For example, we built this big shaded roof structure that protected people, but also protected the oven—because the oven was made of mud—from rain. And so under that shelter, people were able to come together and have conversations, and be warm, and cook, and eat. So it was both. It was both spatial and it was social.
AI Ronald, you’re here because you’re a Curious 100 honoree. We’re curious how you feel your historical and current work is important today, and also, what you’d like to investigate further in the future.
RR It might be the same answer for both, which is: I think it’s really relevant today to think about ways of building that are scalable but are also ecological. And that sounds a little bit trite—everybody wants to do that—but I’m really interested, and invested and focused on this idea of combining earth—humankind’s oldest building technology—with additive manufacturing. Thinking about how we can provide buildings that are fire-resistant, non-toxic, ecological, and beautiful, in a way that responds to the fact that we don’t wake up every morning with a direct connection to the land. Earth architecture traditions have always had this connection to the land. But now we wake up and we go work in bookstores and we work in banks— we’re not actively engaged with the land or with making our homes out of that same land. I think additive manufacturing— robots— might allow us to reintroduce a land-based heritage practice, and a material that humans really resonate with, back into contemporary twenty-first-century living. I’ve done a lot of research projects that demonstrate that’s possible. But they exist as art projects. They look like sculpture. So now the responsible part is demonstrating that they can feel like buildings any of us can relate to— that are culturally sensitive to twenty-first-century living. That we can project ourselves into. It doesn’t look like a building made for the poor, or like alternative construction. It’s modern construction. So that’s my focus. That’s my aspiration. That’s what I’m curious about.
AI I would love to ask you further questions about what makes up a house that anyone can live in, but I think we’re at time.
RR It was such a pleasure to speak with you.