Emerging Voices winner profile
Studio Roberto Rovira
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The Architectural League’s Emerging Voices program annually spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Robert Rovira of Studio Roberto Rivera is a 2015 winner of the award.
Roberto Rovira, a landscape architect with a design, engineering, and fine arts background, founded Studio Roberto Rovira in 2011. Committed to a “process of design development, analysis, and investigation that seeks larger connections to ecology, patterns, history, and time,” the firm produces work at a variety of scales and typologies, including public art, gardens, courtyards, parks, and event pavilions. Recent projects include the Sky Lounge Pavilion at Florida International University in Miami; Magnolia North Park in Opa Locka, Florida; and the Ecological Atlas Project, a mapping method that uses technology to better understand living systems. The Eco Atlas was exhibited at Art Miami in 2012, the Coral Gables Museum in 2013, and Miami’s Arte Americas, a Latin American art fair. Current projects include Wynwood Greenhouse Park in Miami, designed in collaboration with artist Jim Drain and architect Nick Gelpi (GELPI Projects), and Parque de las Flores in Colombia.
The studio’s Sky Lounge project received the AIA Miami Award in 2014 and the Opa Locka Magnolia North Park project received the APA Florida Award of Excellence in 2014. Roberto Rovira was an ASLA National Professional Awards finalist in 2009 and recipient of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Awards Nomination for Excellence in 2008. Small Scale: Creative Solutions for Better City Living was exhibited in a group show by the Boston Society of Architects in 2010 and was also featured in the 5th–8th European Landscape Biennial Exhibits of Landscape Architecture Schools for Florida International University from 2008 to 2014. Roberto Rovira has been published in Innovations in Landscape Architecture, slated for release in 2015, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture in 2014. The Sky Lounge Pavilion was featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine in 2014.
Roberto Rovira is chair of the Landscape Architecture department at Florida International University. He received his M.L.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. Rovira served as a U.S. Naval Officer from 1990 to 1994.