The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, is returning to the first Friday of every month, with a new start time of 12 p.m. FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

Studio Roberto Rovira was founded in Miami, Florida, in 2011. The studio’s expertise spans design, engineering, and art, and its work probes the intersections of art, architecture, and landscape. In the words of its founder, Roberto Rovira, the firm aims to “engage the edges of the built and the natural” and “seeks larger connections to ecology, culture, and the imperative to inspire and engage.”

Completed projects include: 

• The Sky Lounge, a permanent installation at Florida International University with over 3,000 air plants hanging from braided stainless steel shapes. 
• The Ecological Atlas, a comprehensive design and visualization tool conveying changes in bloom times, deciduous tree patterns, produce seasonality, animal migrations, and other time-dependent phenomena.
• Boca Raton Museum of Art, a redesign of the museum’s exterior that transforms the sidewalk into an outdoor public gallery.

Current and upcoming projects include: 

• Casa Coral Redland, a 2.7-acre estate in Florida’s Redland Agricultural District that hosts a variety of temporary art installations.
• Hummingbird House, a large private garden in Florida designed to attract hummingbirds and butterflies.
• Ironside Court, the transformation of a former industrial yard into a habitat-friendly pedestrian landscape.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation and Q&A moderated by Ron Henderson FASLA. Henderson is Professor and Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is also founding principal of LIRIO Landscape Architecture, a Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and a Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow.