Rael San Fratello Retrospective Lands at San Francisco's YBCA

A cylindrical pavilion 3D-printed from soil, straw and water dominates the mid-career retrospective of design studio Rael San Fratello, now open at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco.

The exhibition, Rael San Fratello: Prototypes and Provocations, runs from 25 September to 31 January 2027. The organizers bill it as "the most comprehensive presentation" of the Oakland-based studio's work to date. Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael founded the studio in 2002.

The show gathers structures, objects, models and film. It foregrounds the practice's experimental use of 3D printing with unconventional materials and its sustained engagement with social and political issues.

"Rael San Fratello's work attests to the power of radical imagination grounded in humanistic values and an ethos of play and constant experimentation," said show curator René Morales.

"Blurring the boundaries between architecture and social practice, tradition and technology, poetics and activism, the studio envisions a better world at the same time that it seeks to develop the tools with which we may one day be able to construct for ourselves," Morales added.

The centrepiece, titled Sanctuary, was 3D-printed on-site using a mixture of soil, straw and water. Visitors can walk around it and enter it. A mirrored inflatable orb tops the structure.

"Sanctuary is made from humankind's oldest building material, constructed using emerging robotic technologies," the studio said.

The earthen walls are pierced with glass solar rods salvaged from Solyndra, a once-promising local solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

"Raw earth has sheltered people for 10,000 years, and the Solyndra rods embedded in its walls point to the complexity of combining contemporary and traditional materials," the studio said.

"Bringing them together creates a space to contemplate what endures, what gets discarded, and what deserves a second chance."

A second structure, The Workshop, was commissioned by the arts centre. Its roof is covered in broom heads sourced from an exhibition in Seoul, and its undulating facades are wrapped in biodegradable thermoplastic — PLA filament — and small planter boxes. The installation reflects the studio's broader interest in combining locally available and discarded materials with digital fabrication.

A series of display tables presents 3D-printed objects made from coffee grounds, Chardonnay grape skins and ash collected in the aftermath of the California wildfires.

Elsewhere in the galleries sits Teeter-Totter Wall, one of the studio's most recognised works, placed on a white pedestal in front of a wall showing its deployment. The piece consists of bright-pink seesaws that in 2019 were extended through openings in the US–Mexico border wall, allowing people on opposite sides to interact while riding.

"The work invited a playful, transnational exchange and garnered widespread attention as a powerful symbol of the possibility for connection across a deeply contested divide," the Yerba Buena arts centre said.

The show also includes Tyvek coats that inflate into temporary shelters, and REUNITE, a poster showing the silhouettes of two parents and a child running toward each other, released as an open-source, downloadable image for use in protests.

"Collectively, the works on view speak to Rael San Fratello's ongoing work to develop creative solutions to some of our most challenging social and political issues, while also pioneering ways to incorporate sustainable and often-times unexpected materials into their work," the museum said.

The studio's earlier projects include the 3D-printed Mud Frontiers series and a shed clad in hexagon-shaped tiles with openings for growing succulents. With Sanctuary printed in earth inside a contemporary arts centre, the retrospective frames a practice that treats 10,000-year-old building techniques and robotic fabrication as equally available tools for imagining what gets built next.