Though the forms are drawn from indigenous sources, the production of 3-D printed tiles and other components is anything but. Mr. Rael and Ms. San Fratello deploy a variety of printing methods, often using a process invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called “binder jetting” that consists of a liquid material being sprayed onto a thin layer of powder hundreds or thousands of times until a hardened object emerges. The two also invented a software application for a 3-D printer that extrudes wet clay, pushing it through a nozzle like a gigantic toothpaste tube.

A series of clay vessels called “Bad Ombrés ” was produced by this extrusion method: the name alludes both to President Trump’s comment about Mexicans and a term for the gradual blending of one color into another. Like much of the pair’s work, the vessels marry artisanship and geekiness. The clay is built up layer by layer, producing striated patterns and surfaces resembling knitting, complete with knots and loops. Occasionally, the code will tell the printer to drop a stitch, which creates visual drama.

As they document in “Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing,” published last year, mud is dear to their hearts. Mr. Rael grew up in an adobe house built by his great-grandfather in a small Hispanic village in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. His youthful playgrounds were adobe dwellings in varying states of decay. “I was fascinated with the cactuses growing on roofs, the rays of light and dust,” he said.

They met in 1995 on their first day of architecture school at Columbia University, and traveled to Yemen to explore the ancient walled city of Shibam, a dense cluster of ancient mud-brick buildings often called “the city of skyscrapers in the desert.”

Their design for a 3-D printed free-standing adobe structure is currently on view in the exhibition “New Cities, Future Ruins at the Border” at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (through April 6).