Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx’s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx’s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as “the real art of living.”

The lectures paint a picture of Burle Marx not just as a gardener, artist and botanist, but as a landscape architect whose ambition was to bring radical change to cities and society. The lectures are framed by photographs, by Leonardo Finotti, of a selection of Burle Marx’s realized projects.

About the Authors:

Gareth Doherty is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is the author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State, published in 2017 by the University of California Press. Doherty’s edited books include: Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism and Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, edited with Charles Waldheim. Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color. Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism with Mohsen Mostafavi, which has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, with forthcoming translations in Arabic and Persian.

Roberto Burle Marx was among the leading landscape architects of the twentieth century. Burle Marx's work encompassed a range of scales from private gardens, such as the Fazenda Vargem Grande and his home, Sítio Burle Marx, to urban squares and large-scale public projects, including Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beachfront and Flamengo Park, and the Parque del Este in Caracas. In partnership with Haruyoshi Ono from 1968, the significance of Burle Marx's landscape architecture is often attributed to his use of abstract curves and forms that rarely employ symmetry, and his use of tropical, mainly indigenous Brazilian, flora. Burle Marx was driven by a passionate agenda to improve and conserve landscapes and consequently the lives of the people who live in them.