Ronald Rael, Designer, Activist, Author, Technologist (La Florida, Colorado — Oakland, California)
Rael stands out as a visionary in both additive manufacturing and sustainability, having founded several pioneering companies dedicated to innovating materials and technology on a building scale. Among these, Emerging Objects, his 3D printing Make-Tank, has revolutionized 3D printing's sustainability by blending additive manufacturing with recycled, upcycled, and waste materials such as salt, paper pulp, coffee grounds, recycled car tires, and agricultural waste. Another groundbreaking venture, FORUST, which Rael co-founded, has introduced a game-changing approach to 3D printing by utilizing sawdust from construction industry waste, thereby advancing circular technology. His latest undertaking, Muddy Robots, represents a paradigm shift in building construction, seamlessly integrating humanity's oldest building material, raw earth construction, with cutting-edge additive manufacturing. This innovative fusion creates housing solutions with the potential to mitigate environmental impact by leveraging clay construction's exceptional thermal mass properties, thereby maintaining comfortable interior temperatures without relying on mechanical heating and cooling systems, consequently reducing CO2 emissions in the construction industry. His work is widely lauded, written about, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The London Design Museum, LACMA, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Renwick Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the author of Earth Architecture, Printing Architecture, and Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S. Mexico Boundary and is the Chair of the Department of Art Practice and Eval Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley.
