Architect Ronald Rael has created an angular installation out of 3D-printed mud as part of this year’s Desert X exhibition, which features work by eleven international artists distributed across the Coachella Valley.
For the fifth iteration of Desert X, artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maesta crafted a show informed by the “temporality and nonlinear narratives” of the surrounding desert.
Eleven artists and designers, including Rael and New York artist Agnes Denes, crafted large-scale installations for the exhibition.
“Curated by the place it temporarily inhabits, Desert X reveals the landscape of the Coachella Valley as a canvas of real and imagined histories, narrating tales of displacement, sovereignty, and adaptation superimposed over visible testaments of time,” said Garcia-Maestas.
With his Adobe Oasis installation, co-founder of California-based architecture studio Rael San Fratello Ronald Rael built upon past work exploring material innovation and 3D printing.
Located within Palm Springs, the piece is made of a series of angular walls that bend and weave around a central palm tree, which ultimately informed the textural quality of the installation.
The designer crafted the piece using a large 3D-printing robotic arm that produced wavy layers of mud, or adobe, to create a scallop-like effect.
Rael sought to marry contemporary manufacturing processes with Indigenous and earthen construction techniques to offer “a powerful alternative” to exploitative real estate development.
This was further informed by Rael’s connection to the San Luis Valley, where he splits his time, a historic borderland between the U.S. and Mexico before 1848.
“Against the backdrop of architectural relics from western expansion and 20th-century real estate development, Adobe Oasis stands as a powerful alternative, highlighting the potential of earthen materials amid the climate crisis,” said the team.
Artist Jose Dávila chose to explore the current boundaries of the US-Mexico border with the piece The Act of Being Together, an installation composed of stacked marble blocks.
The blocks were taken from a quarry in Mexico and driven across the border before their installation in Coachella Valley, in part to highlight the “striking presence they create in a foreign landscape”.
Other installations include the Living Pyramid by artist Agnes Denes, which was installed prior to the official Desert X opening. It is composed of plants that line its tiered steps, which will grow and transform the piece for the duration of its showing.
Artists Sanford Biggers, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Raphael Hefti, Sarah Meyohas, Alison Saar, and Muhannad Shono also displayed work, including a white, serpentine pavilion by Meyohas.
The last of the installations by Kapwani Kiwanga and Kimsooja will be installed beginning 15 March.
Previous iterations of Desert X featured work such as a pile-up of shipping containers by American artist Matt Johnson and 14 site-specific installations in the Al Ula desert in Saudi Arabia.
Desert X is on show in California from 11 March to 11 May 2025. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
The photography is by Lance Gerber
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