Roberto Burle Marx
Roberto Burle Marx (1909 – 1994) was a Brazilian Landscape
Architect, who created works of art within the landscape. While studying art in
Germany, 1928, he became interested in tropical plants and, on his return home,
began converting his home into a tropical plant centre, which eventually spanned
800,000 square metres, comprised of thousands of rare species. Burle Marx
replaced the European-style formal gardens of the time with his own country’s
lush tropical flora. Alongside Landscape Architecture, he also had a passion
for painting and designing jewellery, fabric, and stage sets, as well becoming
one of the first prominent figures in Brazil to criticize the destruction of
his country’s rainforests.
Creating nearly 3000 gardens over his career, Burle Marx
always started with a canvas, utilising gouache to represent each type of
vegetation. He aimed to control nature with his creative vision, combining
horticultural skills and artistic training to create landscapes that mimicked abstract
art, often including his own mosaics and sculptures.
Burle Marx’s first major commission, a rooftop garden for
the Ministry of Educational and Health in Rio de Janeiro, was designed to
please both the people that used it, as well as the workers on the floors
above. He utilised organic forms to mimic an abstract river winding alongside a
high-rise ‘mountain’, incorporating movement, texture, and strong colour into
the urban environment.
I first learned of Roberto Burle Marx when I started university
and immediately admired his obvious appreciation for plants and the environment
– a quality any good Landscape Architect must have. Since then, my love of his
work has only grown, I admire the way each project was a work of art for him,
beginning on the canvas before a perfect execution in the landscape. He
utilised texture and abstract shapes to capture the character of his home
country, including native plants in a time when this was not the norm. I admire
the way he created curvilinear lines with plants and colour, making every
landscape fun and exciting.
“A garden is the result of an arrangement of natural
materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist’s
outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his
mistakes, and his successes.” —Roberto Burle Marx
References
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2020) Roberto
Burle Marx. Available at: (Accessed:
30 January 2021)
The Museum of Modern Art. (n.d.) Roberto Burle Marx: The
Unnatural Art of the Garden. Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/337
(Accessed: 30 January 2021)
Malone, C. (2019) The Brilliant Beauty of Roberto Burle
Marx. Available at: https://www.culturedmag.com/roberto-burle-marx/ (Accessed:
30 January 2021)
The Jewish Museum. (1938) Rooftop Garden of the Ministry of Education and Health. Available at: https://www.insidehook.com/article/home-goods/major-retrospective-on-influential-brazilian-landscape-architect-at-the-jewish-museum (Accessed: 30 January 2021)
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