Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich is a licensed Spanish architect and urban designer with an interest in living systems, climate, and soils in urban environments. 

She is a visiting assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches graduate landscape architecture and architecture courses, chairs the lecture series committee, and directs the interdisciplinary core orientation course for graduate students.  

Previously, she taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was the 2017-2018 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship in landscape architecture, teaching graduate studios and seminars. She also coordinated the Design Discovery program in landscape architecture until 2023. From 2014-2017, she taught graduate courses in landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, where she coordinated first-year studies and directed the Summer Design Institute. Prior to moving to the U.S., she held a teaching position at UIC Barcelona. 

Her ongoing project “The Landscape We Eat” seeks to unfold geomorphological, climatic, and infrastructural relationships in food systems. The project started as a collaboration with Mugaritz, a Michelin-recognized restaurant located in the Basque Country of Spain. The resulting work was launched as a performance at the 2014 CA2M Madrid Picnic Sessions Festival, exhibited in Milan as part of the universal exhibition EXPO 2015, and included in the guerrilla cartography of Food Atlas. Her project “The Desert We Eat” was exhibited at the Tallinn architecture biennale.

Her urban design studio research has been exhibited at the Ecological Society of America National Conference in 2015 in Baltimore and part of the International Schools of Architecture Prize at the Ninth Barcelona Biennial of Landscape Architecture. 

In 2010, she received a top award from COAC (Col.legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya) for her built work redesigning the public space of a kindergarten in Catalunya. She has also received architecture competition awards for her unbuilt work, from Barcelona and Madrid municipalities, such as 16 Portes — an urban design competition in Barcelona to re-think the urban ecological edge of the Collserola mountains and the urban metropolitan area of Barcelona. Her work has been published in Detail, Plataforma Arquitectura, and Quaderns, among others. 

In 2019, along with Seth Denizen and David Moreno-Mateos, she was the recipient of the SOM Foundation Research Prize, which allowed her to develop her current research in Mexico City’s urbanism and the Mezquital Valley’s wastewater agricultural system. This research led to a forthcoming book, “Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater urbanism in the Mezquital Valley,” published by Harvard University Press. 

Along with Luis Alexandre-Casanovas, Lys Villabalba, and Seth Denizen, she has completed “Three Ensayos de Paisaje: Ecosistemas del Espacio Publico en Tiempos de Cambio Climatico,” which was a selected project in Premis FAD 2024.