“This landscape? It doesn’t exist. What exists/ is vacant space, to be planted/with landscape retrospectively.” So wrote the Brazilian laureate Carlos Drummond de Andrade in his 1970s poem “How to Make a Landscape.” Andrade, Burle Marx’s almost exact contemporary was, knowingly or not, describing the artist’s nature-inventing work.
One of Burle Marx’s most celebrated projects is the two-and-a-half-mile thoroughfare, Avenida Atlântica, which he designed in 1970 for the Copacabana shoreline in Rio. An unfurling crazy-quilt of rolling, twisting abstract patterning picked out in white, black and brick-brown paving stones, it isn’t his most original concept. The idea is based on Portuguese models. But it is the one that perhaps most fully achieves his long-stated goals of visually activating public space and of giving pleasure, indiscriminately, to the maximum number of people. You don’t walk the promenade, you dance it; its visual rhythms have a samba beat.
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- Revisiting the Constructed Edens of Roberto Burle Marx, Saturday, May 14, 2016 - 14:44