Roberto Rovira listening to questions from the audience after giving his presentation
On February 13th, the Landscape Architecture program welcomed Roberto Rovira, principal at Studio Roberto Rivera, for a full day of learning. Students had the opportunity to chat with Roberto over lunch and hear his journey about how he got to where he is today. After lunch, Roberto visited the BLA and MLA studios to be briefed on the projects being worked on and to provide feedback to the students. Roberto shared lots of insightful design practices and boosted the students’ morale. Following the studio visits, everyone convened in the lecture hall to hear Roberto deliver his presentation, “Land / Art / Tech: Finding Intersections Through Critical Practice.” Some major themes in his lecture and in his work are time and documentation as central facets of practice. Roberto further explained this through displaying different ways he has used time and documentation to portray an idea, a landscape, or a phenomenon. As designers, we can establish time as a major factor in our work through observing the many details in nature that identify different patterns in ecology, such as the growth of a tree or the migrant patterns of birds. Roberto’s design for the Gondwana Circle art installation at the San Francisco Botanical Garden captures this concept beautifully. You can learn more about this project by going to Roberto Rovira’s website.
Later in his lecture, Roberto displayed some of the intensive work he has put into the Ecological Atlas. The Ecological Atlas is an innovative tool that organizes various data to help produce better design decisions. This data includes blooming times of hundreds of plant species, migration patterns of birds and butterflies, and so much more. Through the Ecological Atlas, designers can quickly find information organized clearly and aesthetically that would otherwise require an extensive search. After Roberto’s informative lecture, a reception put the cherry on top of a full day.
