Review: Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable

Abstract

Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable . Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris. 23 March–11 July 2011 Landscape architecture—or perhaps the landscape—features prominently in contemporary design discourses. Seemingly all-encompassing, landscape practitioners intervene on post-industrial sites and regions; they envision scenarios for shrinking cities, hypercities, informal settlements, and shifting riparian zones. It should then come as no surprise that the frequency with which landscape is addressed by curators has recently increased, with Rising Currents at MoMA; Stadtgrun at the Frankfurt Architecture Museum; ManMade Environment initiated by Oslo’s DogA and later shown in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and now Helsinki; and La Ville fertile and Roberto Burle Marx at the Cite de l’Architecture in Paris. This sampling reflects not only the wide range of scales—garden to waterfront—that characterizes designing with/in the landscape but also the competing claims on landscape, greening, and sustainability by landscape architects, architects, and artists. In this fuzzy context, Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable , to whose catalogue this reviewer contributed an essay without in any way participating in the organization of the exhibition, reasserts blue-chip values by viewing the garden as an art form. Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) is a darling of architects and garden lovers, alternately championed as a painter with plants, a preservationist of Brazilian flora, and the inventor of a modernist landscape idiom. He first gained visibility in the 1930s and 1940s from his association with high-profile architects such as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. By the 1950s his fame had reached international audiences. He exhibited his landscapes at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and designed the Brazilian garden at the Brussels world’s fair. MoMA acquired a Burle Marx gouache plan for the 1953 Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo, and included his work in Henry Russell Hitchcock’s 1955 exhibition and book Latin American Architecture since 1945 .1 More than thirty-five years later, …