Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist

On the occasion of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, Kenneth Frampton gave an overview of this prolific landscape architect from São Paulo, whose 60-year career was entwined with that of the greatest architects of his times. His work marked a formal turning point in the art of gardens, and by being a committed horticulturalist and trailblazing ecologist, Burle Marx promoted an innovative botanical research centre dedicated to native Brazilian plants.

- Kenneth Frampton

Starting his adult life as a somewhat conventional painter, Roberto Burle Marx was led into the field of landscape design by two seminal figures, first by his father, Wilhelm Marx, who in the mid-1920s bought him a subscription to the German landscape magazine Gartenschönheit, and second, perhaps more primarily, by his Austro-Hungarian governess, Ana Piascek, who first taught him how to cultivate seeds, and against whose grave he would request to be buried after his death. Possibly influenced by the Brazilian landscapist Mina Klabin Warchavchik’s cactus garden for a modernist villa designed by her husband in 1929, the architect Gregori Warchavchik, Burle Marx’s first garden featuring succulents (