Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994)

In a 2010 interview, the long-time editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine Grady Clay was asked to describe some of landscape architecture’s greatest players of the 20th century. Clay said this about the Brazilian Modernist Roberto Burle Marx: ‘He was big physically and had a huge voice. He sang at parties. He could be heard in the back row no matter what he said.’ Clay was right. Burle Marx certainly knew how to throw a party – his dinners at his experimental nursery and garden estate in Guaratiba, on the western fringes of Rio de Janeiro, were legendary – more importantly, he knew how to make his voice heard. 

The 150-acre (60-hectare) estate, Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica, was host to such international luminaries as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Margaret Mee and Elizabeth Bishop, but more importantly, it was home to Burle Marx’s extraordinary botanical collection of over 3,500 species of tropical plants collected from around Brazil. Purchased with his brother Guilherme Siegfried Burle Marx in 1949, the nursery would become his lifelong project, the nexus of his plant-collecting excursions throughout the various geographic regions of Brazil. Thirty-seven previously unidentified species were discovered on these ‘viagens de coleta’, and their scientific botanical names now include his Latinised name, ‘burle marxii’.

In addition to numerous private gardens, Burle Marx designed an astonishing number of public parks and plazas during his long professional career. Shortly after studying painting at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, a 24-year-old Burle Marx landed in Recife, capital of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, and renovated a series of municipal plazas. These were his first experiments in ecologically composed gardens, veritable tropical tableaux with plants selected from specific ecoregions of Brazil.

The gardens of the Praça de Casa Forte (1935) deploy aquatic plants from the Amazon in geometric reflecting pools, while the Praça Euclides da Cunha (1934) presents an elliptical cactarium garden, an aestheticised composition of xerophytic plants from the sertão, the dry desert interior of north-eastern Brazil. The narrative power of these tropical plantings serves to express ‘Brazilian-ness’, celebrating biodiversity as a key element of Brazil’s modernity. 

Returning to Rio in 1937, Burle Marx collaborated with Lúcio Costa and his team of young Brazilian architects, designing the public plaza and private roof terraces of the famed Ministry of Education and Health building. This was the headquarters of a government ministry established in the early 1930s by Getúlio Vargas, the technocratic revolutionary president. Burle Marx’s fantastic 1938 amoeboid gouache plan of the minister’s roof garden, with its sinuous forms and bright, flat colours, is evocative of the 19th-century garden plans of Rio’s imperial landscape designer, the Frenchman Auguste François Marie Glaziou and his protégé Paul Villon. Though emblematic of Burle Marx’s work, these amoebas, lush with tropical species, reflect a cultural embrace and a reinterpretation of the European colonial presence in the capital.  

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Burle Marx designed large public parks in Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, collaborating with an impressive roster of Brazilian architects. In 1943, Oscar Niemeyer invited Burle Marx to design the gardens for his new complex of social and cultural buildings arrayed around an artificial lake at Pampulha, a new garden suburb north of Belo Horizonte. The result was a splendid example of the plastic integration of modern architecture and landscape. This would be followed in 1953 with Burle Marx’s 14 brilliant but unrealised ornamental gardens complementing Niemeyer’s exhibition buildings, joined by a serpentine roof canopy over a connective esplanade, at Parque Ibirapuera in São Paulo. 

He developed gardens for several luxury apartment buildings and private homes with Rino Levi (Edifício Prudência, 1944, and Casa Olívio Gomes, 1949, among others) as well as gardens and playgrounds for public social housing complexes with Eduardo Kneese de Mello (Edifício Japurá, 1945) in São Paulo, and with Affonso Eduardo Reidy, for the internationally celebrated Conjunto Residencial do Pedregulho (AR October 2019) in Rio de Janeiro, 1951. Burle Marx’s ongoing collaboration with Reidy in Rio de Janeiro would include the geometric gardens for the Museu de Arte Moderna in 1956, followed by the masterful Parque do Flamengo, a landfill and parkway transformed into a splendid public waterfront garden along Guanabara Bay, constructed between 1961 and 1965.

Burle Marx’s clients read as a roster of members of the Brazilian political elite: Vargas’s Minister of Education and Health, Gustavo Capanema; Carlos de Lima Cavalcanti, governor of the state of Pernambuco; Benedito Valadares, governor of the state of Minas Gerais; mayor of Belo Horizonte and future president Juscelino Kubitschek; and Carlos Lacerda, governor of Rio de Janeiro and a key supporter of the US-backed right-wing coup of 1964 that led to a 21-year military regime. Even during the dictatorship in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Burle Marx designed gardens for several new ministry buildings by Niemeyer in Brasília – the ministries of Foreign Relations, of Justice and of the Army. The dictatorship itself was his client. Throughout his professional career, Burle Marx developed and maintained close ties with those in political power, proving himself to be adept at leveraging those connections in order to make a significant contribution to the greater project of the cultural construction of a rapidly modernising country. 

Burle Marx’s experience as a landscape architect and plant hunter was complemented by his highly articulate and activist environmental advocacy. This rhetoric was most pronounced during the military regime that began in 1964 – notably, an oppressive regime with brutal human rights abuses. Many cultural and political figures were harassed, tortured, exiled or otherwise driven from Brazil. By contrast, Burle Marx became a governmental insider, accepting an appointment in 1967 by the first president of the dictatorship, General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, to serve as a member of the Federal Council of Culture. Despite the ethical complexities of collaborating with the regime, Burle Marx considered this consular appointment as a critical cultural project, providing him with a platform from which to develop his ideas of the modern Brazilian landscape, its protection and its relationship to the public realm, even in a milieu in which criticism was highly restricted. His first speech, entitled ‘Brazilian Landscapes’, delivered on 27 April 1967, shortly after his appointment, set the tone: ‘The Brazilian forest is now being destroyed across the entire country … Everywhere I go, destruction can be seen and felt ... This is a state of emergency.’ 

During his seven-year tenure on the Federal Council of Culture from 1967 to 1974, Burle Marx delivered speech after speech; in total, a series of 18 carefully crafted depositions. These prescient depositions raise the spectres of both species extinction and climate change. He noted the disappearance of hardwood tree species; the increase of torrential rains, erosion and mudslides; and the observable changes in the climate. His booming voice addressed deforestation, national parks and land conservation, urban disfiguration, ecological devastation and the unique qualities of the Brazilian landscape, articulating a radical opposition to the regime’s strategy of national economic development – desenvolvimento – that too often resulted in environmental destruction.

As counsellor, he argued for the designation of more national parks and natural reserves, and for robust enforcement of the Brazilian Forestry Code that would protect the country’s forests from exploitative deforestation. He argued against the regime’s policies of agricultural colonisation and economic exploitation in the Amazon basin and elsewhere, addressing an inherent problem within the Forestry Code: the stipulation that a property owner could legally deforest 50 per cent of the native trees on a site – often cleared with fire – and replant with non-native species for a harvesting profit. Without hesitation, he described this as ecological genocide. 

Burle Marx’s consular position provided him with the ability to influence government policy, as well as the interpretation and enforcement of the law. Indeed, as counsellor, he was offered the privilege of reviewing the draft of the 1969 amendment to the 1967 Brazilian Constitution, which made the severely authoritarian 1967 Constitution, launched by Castelo Branco, even more repressive in regards to civil rights. However, Burle Marx focused his comments on the sections that supported his argument for the protection of natural landscapes. Put into sharp relief by the context of political repression and human rights abuses in which it was proffered, his comments were radically prescient in explicitly addressing the contemporary notion of the importance of biodiversity as directly related to human health and wellbeing.

Burle Marx was also a messenger, an early advocate for the environment – his voice and his speeches were some of his most powerful gifts. As an elite cultural counsellor, he remained close to the regime, perhaps a conservative stance. It should be noted that this authoritarian regime was amply supported by the middle and upper classes in Brazil during its whole existence, certainly by those profiting economically. Burle Marx sought to reconcile the world of the environment with that of the encroaching realities of a rapidly urbanising Brazil – one with a massive housing crisis, with extreme income inequalities and with the marginalised poor scraping the landscape and settling informally on the granite hills of Rio de Janeiro.

We must recognise that these realities, and indeed these human rights, were often at odds with his advocacy of landscape conservation. And what of Burle Marx’s decision to work with the military regime? This must be seen as ethically compromised, though also common to many political contexts and certainly inextricable from the international collusion of countries like the US. As Burle Marx’s younger contemporary, the equally fraught artist Hélio Oiticica, would famously stencil on a parangolé flag, ‘Seja marginal, seja herói’, ‘To be marginal is to be a hero’.

Burle Marx’s prescient depositions and his ‘huge voice’ resonate profoundly today – we might wishfully imagine him as a respondent to Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his defence of the burning Amazon. ‘Our sovereignty is non-negotiable’, stated the Bolsonaro administration following the G7 summit in August 2019. Half a century ago, in reference to clearing fires perpetrated in the Amazon rainforest by the multinational corporation Volkswagen do Brasil, Burle Marx asserted, ‘You have to understand that it is my obligation to oppose everything that I consider an ecological crime … The sacrifice of nature is irreversible.’