Roberto Burle Marx

Landscape Architect, Brazil
Roberto Burle Marx was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on 9 August 1909. A painter,
muralist, sculptor, designer, architect, botanist, and landscape architect, Burle Marx is
said to be the greatest single influence on gardens since the development of the English
tradition in the 18th century.
The son of a wealthy family of European descent (his father Wilhem was born in
Trier, the same city as Karl Marx), Burle Marx moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro,
where he was educated in music and the arts from an early age. Before entering the
Brazilian School of Beaux Arts (ENBA) in 1930, Burle Marx spent two years in Europe,
mainly in Germany. There, in an encounter that would influence his whole life, he fell in
love with Brazilian native plants in a botanical museum. Not yet valued by the Brazilian
elite, which at that time saw themselves as Europeans in the tropics, the Brazilian flora
impressed the young Burle Marx. It is worth noting that in the 19th century, Brazilian
cities imported plants and tree species for its gardens, following a tradition started by the
Portuguese king João VI when he moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 and founded the J ardim Botânico
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(botanical garden) the following year. Burle Marx had traveled to dive into European
culture, and instead he found his own. Returning to Brazil, he had as a mentor Henrique
Melo Barreto, head of Rio’s botanical garden.
At the ENBA, Burle Marx got in touch with a generation of extraordinary colleagues
like Jorge Moreira, Carlos Leão, Luis Nunes, Affonso Reidy, and Oscar Niemeyer, under
the advice of Lúcio Costa. Named director of the ENBA in 1930, Costa had changed the
whole curriculum from one that was highly classical to one that introduced the methods
and ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Despite its modernist inclinations, however,
the ENBA did not reject its faith in drawing as an important part of the process, and Burle
Marx would profit from both the rigor of academic sketching and the freedom of
modernist composition.
After graduating in 1934, Marx moved to Recife, in the Brazilian northeast, with the
task of supervising the renovation of the city’s parks and public squares. A few works
remain from this period, in which he mainly rebuilt gardens that already existed but, for
the first time, introduced native plants into those compositions. In the northeast, he
developed more and more his love for documenting, researching, and collecting native
Brazilian plants—a task that he would continue through his whole life.
Returning to Rio in 1937, he was invited by Costa to collaborate on the gardens for the
Ministry of Education (MES) building. A landmark of Brazilian modernism and one of
the first high-rises to be built in accordance with Le Corbusier’s “Five Points,” the MES
building had the French master himself as a consultant. After that, Burle Marx designed
and executed a series of gardens that are landmarks of Brazilian modern architecture and
almost always associated with a building by one of his colleagues. In Belo Horizonte, he
designed the gardens around the Pampulha buildings (by Oscar Niemeyer) in 1942; in
Rio, the garden in front of the Santos Dumont airport (by Roberto brothers) in 1952 and the gardens
around the Modern Art Museum (by Affonso Reidy) and the whole Flamengo sea shore park in
1954–56.
Burle Marx used the topography as a field of work and integrated nature and building
in a way that was unknown in Brazil, which was accustomed to the Iberian tradition of
separation between city and nature. With an extensive knowledge of the plants’ life
cycles, especially those of the native flora, Burle Marx organized his gardens with natural
elements the same way other artists worked on canvas with paint and brush. His creations
were always multifaceted, and in his gardens he had a unique ability to anticipate the
mature and organic three-dimensional composition from the plan only.
After designing exuberant gardens that represent the best of Brazilian architecture of
the 1950s, Burle Marx also worked in Brasilia at the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the
Army ministry (1965) and in Rio at the State Oil Company (1969) and the Xerox
Building (1980). His most publicized landscape project might be the sidewalk and
arborization of the Copacabana beach (1970). Many of his gardens in Brazil are now
protected by federal and state conservation offices, and the firm Burle Marx and Cia
continues his legacy. Burle Marx also worked outside the boundaries of Brazil and
designed the sidewalks and gardens of Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, Florida, and the
Ciudad del Este Park in Caracas, Venezuela. In close collaboration with other Brazilian
outstanding modernist architects and in full compliance with Costa’s intellectual idea of
bridging the local and the universal, the modern and the antique, Burle Marx left an
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impressive body of work, unsurpassed by any other landscape designer of the 20th
century.