As designers, who wouldn't want want a landscape plan by Roberto Burle Marx to frame and put up on the wall ... abstract modern art at some of its best. Not only was Burle Marx a celebrated landscape architect, he also designed jewelry, tile mosaics, textiles and tapestries, and was a painter and sculptor as well.
The current exhibition of his works at the Jewish Museum in New York City (which runs through September 18) is accompanied by a book that spans the entire range of his works, Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist
Burle Marx, son of a Jewish-German father and Brazilian mother, was reared in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On a trip to Berlin with his parents, he encountered both Modernism and, in the Botanical Garden, tropical plants that were treated like weeds back home. As Hoffman notes, once he began thinking of landscapes as paintings, "The flowers and the plants were his brushes and his colours, and the landscape became his canvas."
This beautiful book has chapters on his early drawings and paintings, his first gardens, some of his most important landscape designs -- public and private -- plus his paintings, textiles, sculptures, and much more.
If you're an avid fan of Burle Marx, as most designers are, you won't want to go a moment without this book.
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