The Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro have been a showcase more for Brazil’s political and economic anxiety than any kind of architectural drama. None of the venues built for the Games is unorthodox or photogenic enough to rival Herzog & de Meuron’s 2008 Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing or the swimming and diving center the late Zaha Hadid designed for London four years ago.
But if you look closely enough, even or perhaps especially on TV, you can get a quick education in modern design anyway. The great Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who died in 1994 at 84, has emerged as a mute and minor star, a compelling bit player, of these Summer Games.
His fluid and brightly colored style — imagine a Southern Hemisphere Jean Arp with a dash of Ellsworth Kelly — has clearly influenced the Games’ official graphic design, which you can glimpse on digital screens behind the swimmers and divers and at other venues.
And his 1970 redesign of the sidewalks and public spaces on Avenida Atlântica, which runs in a wide crescent along Copacabana Beach, has already popped up a number of times on NBC this week. When the cyclists in the women’s road race pedaled from the starting line, they were flanked in the aerial shots by long stretches of Burle Marx-designed pavement.
Anybody familiar with his career, which is the subject of a dense and appealingly wide-ranging exhibition that will run through Sept. 18 at the Jewish Museum in New York before traveling to Rio next year, will not be surprised by this moment in the spotlight. If there were ever a body of work seemingly tailor-made to be captured by blimp, helicopter, hotel balcony or drone and sent out to the rest of the world via TV, computer screen or smartphone, it belongs to Burle Marx.
