Gallery: Meet the Garden Designer Who Transformed Rio de Janeiro
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This summer, millions of eyes will be watching Rio de Janeiro, as the 2016 Summer Olympics descend on the Brazilian city. They'll see many works by Roberto Burle Marx, the midcentury garden designer with prescient ideas about shaping public spaces. This one happens to be in São Paulo. Burle Marx designed the mineral roof garden at Banco Safra headquarters in 1983.
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This is Biscayne Boulevard, in Miami, designed by Burle Marx from 1988-2004. He described himself as a painter before he was a landscape architect, and often used these abstract geometries to paint public spaces.
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Roberto Burle Marx painting a tablecloth in the loggia of his home in the 1980s. The azulejo tile walls and chandelier composed of fruit and flowers on a metal armature are his work.
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The exhibit also features paintings, sculptures, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, and works of stained-glass. Claudia Nahson, the show's curator, says Burle Marx, who died in 1994, was a real polymath, and that a comprehensive survey of his work, the first in a quarter century, is long overdue.
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Burle Marx had early ideas about native flora. In midcentury Brazil, aristocratic gardens often mimicked European ones. Burle Marx realized that the local flora in Brazil should be celebrated, and began introducing native plants into his designs—something that cities today, like Los Angeles, are attempting to do more of.
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Burle Marx was also an early ecologist. He advocated for the rainforests, and discovered several varieties of plants in his lifetime.
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Here, a plan for a garden at the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro.
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A Burle Marx cover design for the magazine Revista Rio, from the late 1940s.
