Vol. 11 Presenter: Ronald Rael
Presenting
Teeter-Totter Wall
Summary
This virtual presentation comes from the famed architect Ronald Rael. He shares with us reflections on his return to his ancestral home in Southern Colorado and his 2019 collaboration with architect Virginia San Fratello—the Teeter-Totter Wall—three pink-see-saws on the US-Mexico border, which was named 2020 Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London.
Bio
Ronald Rael is a designer, architectural researcher, author, entrepreneur, and thought leader in the fields of additive manufacturing and earthen architecture. He is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Director of the Masters of Architecture program with a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (University of California Press 2017), an illustrated biography and protest of the wall dividing the U.S. from Mexico (featured in a TED talk by Rael), and Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), a history of building with earth in the modern era. Rael San Fratello, the studio he co-founded with architect Virginia San Fratello, was named a 2014 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture.
Rael’s work has been published widely, including the New York Times, Wired, MARK, Domus, Metropolis Magazine, PRAXIS, Thresholds, Log, Public Art Review. His work has been included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya.