Burle Marx: the Brazilian landscaper who embraced local flora to defend a city for all

The promenade of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, with the waves and geometric designs in white, black and reddish Portuguese stones, is one of the masterpieces of the Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), famous creator of tropical gardens that turned traditional landscaping upside down.

But the artist (he was a landscape painter among many other things) had other concerns beyond leaving his mark on the most famous postcard in Brazil.

His vocation led him to fight for a city for everyone, also for those who could not afford an apartment with sea views.

This is what highlights the exhibition

Living Place: the Legacy of Burle Marx

, which has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio and focuses on 22 of his projects for public space, bringing together almost 100 objects from your personal file.

Two men carry surfboards on the Copacabana boardwalk.Matthew Ashton (Getty Images)

Many of those projects, however, remained in a drawer.

And the exhibition begins precisely by provoking questions: on the one hand there are the sketches of the Flamengo park, where the museum itself is located, a 140-hectare orchard reclaimed from the sea, with 17,000 trees of 240 species that connects the center of Rio with the affluent South Zone.

On the other hand, the project for a park that was never built in Bangu, an impoverished neighborhood 40 kilometers from the beach, which in Rio is famous for being a pressure cooker, largely because there is a lack of trees and excess asphalt.

Other dreams of integration in an extremely unequal city saw the light only half, such as an ambitious park next to Maré, one of the most violent favela complexes in Rio.

Only the first phase was built, and after years of abandonment, there is hardly any dilapidated square left.

Another frustrated project gives an idea of ​​how the landscaper was ahead of his time: in 1946 he came to devise a zoo without cages, with the animals separated by natural barriers and surrounded by the vegetation of their natural habitat.

A sketch of the Brasília zoo, made by Burle Marx.Rafael Adorján (Courtesy)

“We want to talk about how he thought of the city as a whole, that provocation is very present, the idea that the right to public space, to green space, was a right of the entire population,” explains Pablo Lafuente, director of the museum and one of the curators of the exhibition, along with Beatriz Lemos and Isabela Ono.

The three advance carefully among workers who have just hung the last paintings while remembering that the visitor will be lucky enough to see, in the same place, the artist's idea and the execution: on the wall, the plans;

and looking through the museum's enormous windows, the result some decades later: ponds with water lilies on one side, an original pebble garden on the other.

The exhibition, which can be visited until the end of June, also reminds us that Burle Marx was, above all, the father of the modern tropical garden.

He broke with the gardens of trimmed hedges and squared lines of French inspiration, imposed curves and asymmetry and, above all, valued the rich local flora.

In one of his first projects, from 1935, he designed a plaza in the city of Recife and adorned it with native cacti: hardy plants that needed little care.

The ladies of Recife's high society, accustomed to walking among rose gardens, wrote to the local newspaper, outraged by such a provocation.

The truth is that the Brazilian changed roses for cacti, bromeliads, and hundreds of other species that he discovered and cataloged throughout his life.

There were so many that more than 30 pay tribute to him in his scientific name in Latin.

Burle Marx's colorful flats for parks and squares appear, at first glance, to be works of abstract art.

When observing the detail, you can see how each color spot corresponds to a different plant, delicately described in the legend of the drawing.

A plan of the Ibirapuera Park, located in São Paulo.Thomas Griesel (Moma)

Burle Marx was a Renaissance man in the tropics: he thought about the city, traveled the world in search of plants, painted, sculpted, created both tiny jewels and monumental tapestries, sang opera, was passionate about cooking and apparently threw legendary parties. on his farm on the outskirts of Rio.

Of all these facets, one of the ones that most connects him with today's world is his environmentalist side.

In the sixties and seventies he was already standing up to the military dictatorship for the construction of the Transamazónica, the highway that divided the Amazon in two, as can be seen in some newspaper clippings present in the exhibition.

Connections to contemporary Brazil continue through six artists the museum invited to create works inspired by its legacy (such as Rio native João Modé, who welcomes visitors with an installation that recreates a patch of jungle in the iconic spiral staircase of the museum).

Also with a demand for a less vertical and more collective way of working.

If Burle Marx worked side by side with other geniuses of the Brazilian modernist movement, such as Oscar Niemeyer or Lucio Costa, in a dozen videos, his closest collaborators, from architects to gardeners, tell what it was like to work day by day with the landscaper.

Haruyoshi Ono stands out, who spent 30 years working with him and organized his archive after his death.

His daughter, Isabela Ono, is now the director of the Burle Marx Institute.

The efforts of Burle Marx and his team to integrate the city and nature through a democratic and quality public space were one of the reasons that in 2012 Rio became the first city in the world to receive from UNESCO the World Heritage title in the urban cultural landscape category.

Nine years later, UNESCO also blessed the lush estate where he lived and where he gathered his collection of tropical plants as a treasure for all humanity, where he began to shape modern gardens.

The gardens of Burle Marx's house, named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.Mario Lobão (AP)

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