Archive: Roberto Burle Marx

For Le Corbusier, the rainforests of South America reminded him of “the horrible mold” that would collect in and around his mother’s homemade jars of jam. The open expanse of the Amazon struck the famed modernist with, if not fear exactly, then at least a great deal of frustration. With tropics and wildlife, the impulse to control was futile.

For the Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx, however, who was studying European modernism in Berlin while Le Corbusier was flying over the Amazon, the tropics were not an intractable “mold” but instead represented the possibility of rethinking design’s relationship to nature altogether. What if, instead of the kind of concrete-poured control that Le Corbusier insisted upon, landscape design might be integrated within its surroundings? Burle Marx’s best-known work—an undulating design of white, black and brown paving stones along the Copacabana boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro—illustrates his drive to activate landscapes, rather than prescribe them.

Burle Marx grew up in early 20th-century Brazil, a time defined as much by the incoming military dictatorship as by a growing environmental consciousness, bossa nova music and burgeoning artistic liberalism. He was born in 1909 in São Paulo to an upwardly mobile Jewish immigrant father and a Catholic mother, who was a talented gardener. His parents were particularly cosmopolitan: The writer Stefan Zweig and the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos dropped by their spacious home from time to time, and the pianist Arthur Rubinstein stayed with them whenever he had concerts in the area. As a teenager, Burle Marx studied opera in São Paolo. When he turned 19, he left to study painting in Berlin. His parents tagged along, taking him away from his studies three, four, sometimes five nights a week in order to go to the opera, with particular emphasis on those by Wagner and Strauss.

“There was almost nothing, in any aspect of culture, that Burle Marx wasn’t a part of,” says Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at NYU, who specializes in Latin American art and is curator of the Burle Marx retrospective that opened at the New York Botanical Garden in June 2019. “He was a Renaissance man and somebody who excelled at virtually everything he did.”

In Berlin, he established his design basis in modernism with numerous trips to see paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh. A presentation of exotic Brazilian plants at the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden, arranged in a European style, had a particular effect on him. The philodendrons, water lilies and snakewood plants—all common in Brazil but generally ignored in Brazilian gardening practices—were here lovingly organized and showcased, unlocking in Burle Marx a desire to rethink the immense floral resources he had access to back home.

“His goal was to use his gardens’ design not to control—but to unlock.”

“It was there that I realized the strength of the pristine nature of the tropics, that I had there, in my hands, as raw matter ready to serve to my own artistic project,” he recalled in a conference he gave in 1954. His career moved rapidly. He returned to Brazil, studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio, and received a commission from Lúcio Costa—an architect and urban designer and one of his professors—to design a private garden. Two years later, Burle Marx was directing the planning of all urban parks in Recife, in the country’s northeast, before striking out on his own, eventually designing over 3,000 gardens around the world.

One of the most important buildings he helped design was Rio’s 15-story Ministry of Education and Health, also called the Gustavo Capanema Palace. Designed between 1935 and 1936, it became the first public building in the Americas to be designed using modernist principles.

Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer asked Le Corbusier to advise on the project, and the building’s raised pillars—about 10 feet high to allow for unobstructed access—show the French architect’s influence, as does the structural airiness of its facade. But the building also stands as one of the great Brazilian architectural accomplishments thanks to Burle Marx’s gardens. The floor tiles and murals were designed under his direction, creating artworks and color schemes that “cannibalized” European modernist culture while also defying it, as the poet Oswald de Andrade had implored Brazilian artists to do in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago.

Burle Marx’s tropical gardens make up the courtyard and contain rare plant life, including the Roystonea oleracea, a kind of palm tree found only in Latin America. He also designed the roof garden, relying again on the typical Brazilian plant life that had captivated him in Berlin decades before. The building’s architectural style underscored the enormous gulf between Brazil’s official authoritarian politics and the open, democratic ideals valued by Burle Marx. It was commissioned during the reign of Getúlio Vargas—the dictator who ruled for 15 years and modeled much of his public image after Benito Mussolini and the Italian fascists. But Burle Marx’s winding garden paths and his reorganization of plants based on painterly principles (grouped often by color, as though pigments on a canvas) marked Brazil’s mid-century cultural liberation and antiauthoritarian impulses. The gardens literally led to nowhere. They were solely about beauty rather than commerce or military might. Burle Marx was never an outright government protestor. He worked with the military council but believed that he could shape Brazil’s cultural policies from the inside out. He needed a platform to affect preservation and climate change.

“He worked with the government while also making speeches about the destruction of the Amazon, about the environmental perils that his own gardens faced,” said Sullivan. “Ultimately, this made him one of the most important figures in the fight to preserve nature in Brazil.”

Burle Marx’s style of landscape architecture is situated within the broader category of modernist architecture, but he always believed that a designer must be proficient in the entirety of his style, ideally the whole of art history, not just a single niche. His goal was to use his gardens’ design not to control—but to unlock. Observe his former home in Rio, lush with nearly 500 plant varietals, or walk down the 2½-mile promenade that he designed along Copacabana Beach, and one finds that his detailed attention leads to design that is not oppressive but freeing; a bossa nova energy carries you as you stroll along the seaside.

Burle Marx died in Rio in 1994. Today, under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil is facing the threat of environmental degradation like never before. Is there an artist who will step up now, to wield the language of political activism while also introducing a fresh form of design?

“That’s what I hope more than anything to achieve with this exhibition,” Sullivan says of his show. “We want to not only bring the personality of Burle Marx to the fore but also to show how one can speak the design language of preservation when, today, there’s a huge danger to Brazilian—and global—nature.”

“There was almost nothing that Burle Marx wasn’t a part of. He was a Renaissance man.”