As the designer of the wavy, world-famous pavements of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach and a frequent collaborator with architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) is hardly an obscure figure. But his stock has risen in the United States over the past few years, with a spate of exhibitions and books exploring his vast body of work.
Burle (pronounced bur-lee) Marx is remembered primarily for his nearly 3,000 landscape projects, in which he combined an artist’s instinct for abstraction with a naturalist’s deep love of trees and plants, especially species native to Brazil. There was seemingly nothing that the protean Burle Marx couldn’t (and didn’t) do: At his lush estate outside of Rio, he painted, drew, made prints, designed textiles, played the piano, and cultivated thousands of plants, some of them specimens he had collected on trips into the rainforest. (Numerous species have been named after Burle Marx, such as the flower Heliconia hirsuta burle marxii.)
