Inside: Bruce Zaretsky on Saying ‘No’

D e s i g n • E n g i n e e r i n g • C o n s t r u c t i o n

Volume 9Number 10

October 2007$6.00

BrazilianRhythmsBrazilianRhythmsAn homage to the legacyof Roberto Burle Marx

Plus: Wave pools and the

generation of good, clean fun

Plus: Wave pools and the

generation of good, clean fun

Team EffortTeam EffortA clifftop, island projectand the value of collaborationA clifftop, island projectand the value of collaboration

2

I first became an admirer of Roberto Burle Marxwhile I was a student in landscape architecture at theUniversity of Florida: His remarkable work, whichcombined a special brand of modernism with the lushpotential of Brazilian settings, was incredibly power-ful and the major formative influence on my own pro-fessional career.

I’d learned how to draw in school and had acquiredthe technical skills it took to be a landscape architect, butit was seeing how Burle Marx approached his landscapesand paintings – not to mention the way he lived his life –that gave me the spark I needed to define my own approach.

My personal relationship with him began soon after I graduat-ed in 1981. I’d read an article in the Miami Herald about Burle Marxturning 70 and began writing to him in hopes he’d invite me to visit hishome in Brazil. A couple of months later, I received a call from my friend LesterPancoast, a well-known Miami architect. He mentioned that Burle Marx was hishouseguest, said the great man had a free evening and suggested I should invite himto dinner – which I did without hesitation.

My future wife and I spent a nice evening with Burle Marx, who was reserved butvery polite and seemed all the while to be sizing us up. After dinner, we went toPancoast’s home, where Burle Marx showed us some amazing black-and-white etch-ings he’d recently completed and offered to sell them to us for $500 apiece. We im-mediately latched onto a couple, and it was obvious that he appreciated people whoappreciated his art.

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A Master at Work

When it comes to iden-tifying those who’ve shaped his

life and work, acclaimed landscapearchitect Raymond Jungles doesn’t hes-

itate in naming Brazilian designer RobertoBurle Marx as a singularly profound influ-ence. Famous for bold arrangements of plantmaterials and architectural forms, BurleMarx’s gardens are among the world’s

most celebrated and studied – a lega-cy Jungles describes here as a

close friend and student ofthe master.

By Raymond Jungles

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Burle Marx

It was the beginning of a friendshipthat would last the 14 years until BurleMarx died in 1994.

GOING SOUTHAbout two months after our first

meeting, Burle Marx was passingthrough Miami on his way home andhad apparently paid some attention tomy requests to see his work in Brazil atfirsthand: I jumped at the chance whenhe asked me to join him on his returntrip. When we arrived in Rio de Janeiro,I humbly asked when I might visit hishome. Now, he told me,ushering me tohis vehicle to join several other peoplein his entourage.

It was fascinating to watch the way helived his life. He approached everythinghe did with the same passion and bold-ness that defined his work and loved be-ing surrounded by all sorts of interest-ing,creative people including musicians,sculptors, botanists, painters, architects,writers and others who regularly spenttime with Burle Marx. We shared goodfood and fine wine and generally had awonderful time.

He was one of those people whoseemed to thrive at the center of an in-credibly dynamic scene. I came to seebeing around him as participating in anongoing celebration of all things artisticand creative.

Experiencing all this at a young age tru-ly opened my eyes as to how a personcould live an artist’s life. I was impressed,for example,by the way he ran his studio:It wasn’t in any way an oppressive workenvironment, but was instead a free-wheeling agglomeration of constant cre-ative energy. His associates came and went

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No matter whether the project was com-mercial or residential, large scale or small,Burle Marx approached each setting indi-vidually and had an amazing ability to ap-proach a space without relying on formulas,conventions or preconceptions. This ten-dency toward originality showed up with par-ticular clarity in formal architectural settings,where he played off rigid forms by usingplants and water in immensely creative andimaginative ways.

with great freedom so long as the workwas done. And that work was amazing,ashe seemed by strength of personality todraw the very best out of his colleagues –all of whom seemed to have the same ad-miration for him that I did.

I never worked with him on any pro-ject, but I did have the privilege of visit-ing him at least once each year to rechargemy creative batteries. I was particularlyhappy to visit in August,when he’d hostthese massive birthday parties attendedby scores of interesting people: Theywere, quite simply, some of the mostmemorable events I’ve ever attended.

Once the festivities were over,he’d leadus on excursions to study gardens or col-lect plants in the wild. Through it all, hewas remarkably generous; in fact,only mymother outranks him as the most givingperson I’ve ever known: He was an openbook, always more than happy to talkabout his work or share anything by theway of prints or sketches from his officeor cuttings from his nursery or garden.

It was as if life was somehow bigger ormore important when we were in hispresence. Burle Marx truly was largerthan life, one of the kindest people I’veever known – and a lot of fun besides.

PERFECT INFLUENCEAs much as I admired his passion for

life,I can’t even begin to describe the depthof Burle Marx’s influence on my work.

Through the years, he always passedthrough Miami on his way to wherev-er he might be going in the UnitedStates, and he was often a guest in myhome as a result. During those visits,I’d always show him drawings of pro-jects I was working on, and if time al-lowed we’d also visit some of the gar-dens I had designed.

He was always completely candid invoicing his opinions and never hesitat-ed to tell me what he liked and didn’tlike. He had a colorful way of express-ing himself, but there was never anydoubt about what he really thought. Ilearned a great deal from these vivid cri-tiques – so much so that to this day, I stillthink in terms of what Burle Marx woulddo or say in a given situation.

To this day, however, I find it difficult

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Burle Marx

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Although Burle Marx used nature for inspira-tion, he wasn’t particularly inclined to mim-ic it directly. Instead, he used plants, stoneand water to suggest nature in the midst ofspaces clearly laid out and intended for hu-man use. This is a tactic I’ve often used my-self (opposite), setting up spaces that areclearly non-natural but using plants and wa-ter to tie everything back to common experi-ences of nature.

Jungles

to describe Burle Marx’s work in words:You really have to see and process sever-al of his projects to understand his ap-proach to landscapes. He was incredi-bly perceptive, always had a keen senseof how to dissect a given space and ab-horred the thought that there could beany specific formula for design success.Always,he approached each space on itsown merits and terms.

His work is often described as mod-ernist,but at the same time,everything hetouched was obviously and deeply influ-enced by natural forms. He often usedgroupings of the same type of plant, forexample, and was a careful student ofbotanical forms and structures. He alsobelieved that,as a designer,he had an oblig-ation to stay up to date and work with thebest available tools and technologies.

Most of all, he was always inventive.He might, for example, take the stonesfrom an old building to create a texturewall,but there was never a sense that thiswas mere decoration. He was appalledby neoclassicism, but there was still atimeless quality to his work. He believedthat color should be applied for specif-ic reasons and never splattered themabout for their own sake. If he used red,for example, it was subordinated to theoverall composition and usually servedthe specific purpose of drawing atten-tion to a particular part of the design.

Despite the influence of nature on hiswork,however,Burle Marx never directlyemulated nature. If he created a water-fall, for example, he’d use the stone ma-terial to shape architectural statementsthat he controlled. In effect, while hiswork always harmonized with naturalsettings, it was obviously man-made. Inhis warm minimalism, he revealed hismastery by blurring the boundaries be-tween natural and built environments.

POSITIVE REFLECTIONSI’ve never sought to copy Burle Marx

in my own work,but his influence is cer-tainly evident in almost every project I’veever done.

As he did, I believe very much inworking with a contemporary, modernvocabulary and avoiding classical forms.Unlike many of his gardens, however,

those I design can be more direct in theirrepresentation of nature – visually strongand carrying the appearance of natural-ly occurring phenomena.

I also draw contrasts by using archi-tectural elements in much the way he did.My hardscapes tend to be very strong andclean, and I love the minimalism foundin Japanese architecture and a numberof contemporary architects and design-ers – Burle Marx chief among them.

I don’t work with formality of the sort

seen in European gardens and, like BurleMarx, try to use the geometry of mod-ernism to emphasize the natural ele-ments in plantings, water and stone.Sometimes those spaces are “organized”and may seem formal, but my aim,which I’ve borrowed from Burle Marxto a large extent, is to create both har-mony and tension between nature andstructures arrayed in its midst.

In that sense,we have a similarly play-ful approach to two prevailing schools

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Burle Marx

of thought: On the one hand, modernarchitecture is seen as a contrast to na-ture, but on the other, it can be used tofuse natural elements together with builtstructures. We work in both worlds,andthe balances and sensations of integra-tion can be truly sublime. A portion ofa wall, for example, has a distinct form,but it never sits alone and aloof as a sep-arate sculptural statement.

When I have the opportunity to workin a dramatic natural setting (on theseashore or in a desert or high in themountains), striking those balances canbe fairly easy because all I really need todo is to find ways to allow the beauty ofthe setting to invade the built spaces. Mostof the time,however,I work in places that

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Burle Marx often used architectural forms in his waterfeatures, playing with contrasts between natural and artificial statements to highlight spacesand bring them into harmony with their overall surroundings. His sense of these shapes was well ahead of its time – he was truly one of water-shaping’s pioneers – and his work exemplifies design insights and details I’ve translated and played with throughout my own career.

Jungles

have already been touched by develop-ment, whether on the coast, in the sub-urbs or in completely urban locales. Nomatter where I find myself, the challengeis to establish gardens that bring the com-fort and beauty of nature into the setting.

This is an area in which Burle Marx’sart was supreme: Wherever he worked,his desire for balance invariably over-came the human impulse to dominatenature (or even fear it).

INTUITIVE INCLINATIONSAs designers, we spend most of our

time finding solutions to challenges pre-sented by the spaces we confront, but toa large extent the process boils down todetermining what we like and don’t like.That’s why no two designers are the sameand,as much as someone like me can beinfluenced by someone like Burle Marx,the fact is that any design is the productof an individual designer’s intuitions andexperiences.

Burle Marx is no different. As is thecase with most great artists,his work wasintricately tied to his time and place:When he was completing his early pro-jects in the 1930s and ’40s, he was sur-rounded by the explosive influence ofarchitectural modernism as it sweptacross the globe and its original formswere altered and expanded in responseto local cultures, individual artists andinterested architects.

In Burle Marx’s case, he was workingprimarily in Brazil through those yearsand is credited for pioneering mod-ernism in his country, which is gracedwith incredibly bold landscapes loadedwith spectacular mountains, lush flora,striking geological formations and amaz-ing seascapes. In such settings,a designerwith Burle Marx’s outgoing, engagedpersonality was naturally going to dobold and exciting things.

He’s renowned to this day for his useof grouped plantings, for instance. Youdon’t tend to see a single palm tree in thenatural world, but instead of plantingtrees of similar size, Burle Marx wouldstagger their sizes to make it look asthough the main trees had droppedseeds and established a colony. Theseplantings were a literal representation of

what he saw in nature, but at the sametime they brought visual structure to aspace and helped observers understandthe character of the plants.

Burle Marx is particularly revered forhis bold patterns, but when you visit hisown garden, the impression is all aboutsoftness and subtlety. I always admiredhim for that: These small contradictionshave always kept people from packinghim into any sort of conceptual box.

He was also generous in giving cred-it to artists whose work influenced hisown. I asked him once if Japanese de-sign had influenced him. He simplyshrugged and said,“How can you go toJapan and not be influenced?”

Burle Marx also had a wonderful

sense of how gardens and architecturework together. In that sense, his ap-proach reminds me of Luis Barraganor Ricardo Legorreta, both of whomthoroughly combine their buildingswith garden spaces. Their gardensaren’t particularly lush (their Mexicobeing quite arid compared to BurleMarx’s Brazil), but all three demon-strate a similar urge to harmonizestructures and natural forms.

WATER SPIRITSOne of the things that Burle Marx had

going for him was an encyclopedicknowledge of the plant kingdom and hisspecial ability to conceptualize his way

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Burle Marx

When he explored modernstyles and used more pure-ly decorative forms, BurleMarx stepped well away fromconvention and emphasizedthe natural features of water,plants, stone and, in onememorable case, tile – evenin formal or overtly geomet-rical settings. I pursue thesame general philosophy,which I see expressed notonly in my work but in thework of the likes of RicardoLegorreta and Luis Barragan,with all of us striving to har-monize structures and nat-ural forms as Burle Marx did.

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Jungles

through all the possibilities in everythingfrom lush forest settings to desert climes.(I remember asking him what hethought of Barragan; he smiled and said,“He needs to use more plants.”) No mat-ter where he worked,Burle Marx carriedthat trove of information with him.

Burle Marx also shared the view withBarragan, Legorreta and others that wa-ter was a crucial design element and sawto its effective use in a large percentageof his designs.

Indeed, he used water as a funda-mental building block,and I particular-ly admired the way he would divert partsof streams to create small pools that re-flected the sky, surrounding structuresand plants. He understood that watercreated powerful points of focus andthat, as human beings, we’re all deeplyaffected by its presence.

In the tropics, where he did the ma-jority of his work, water is an incrediblypowerful presence both in the way it sus-tains flora and fauna and as a destructiveforce. He knew water to sooth and com-fort,but he also knew it to excite and eventerrify. At the same time,he knew in aridsettings that the scarcity of water definesthe landscape and that its presence cre-ates oasis-like havens.

Burle Marx keenly understood thesedynamics and used the reflective qualityof water, its sounds and the structures heused to contain it to tremendous effect.

I try to do much the same in my own

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Burle Marx

work,and I love to include relatively largebodies of water and use reflections to in-fluence, for example, observers’percep-tions of interior spaces. In this way, I usewater to conjure senses of grand dimen-sions even in small spaces that would bevisually diminished without its assistance.

In a much larger sense, we’re ablethrough water to connect just about anyspace to the entire universe. That mayseem like overreaching,but when you seeand understand the way Burle Marx andother great designers use water for justthat purpose,a big,abstract idea becomesan entirely practical principle of design.

Burle Marx was ingenious as well in theways he incorporated plants into his wa-tergardens. Because he understood themall so completely, he was able set variousspecies at precise elevations so their rootsystems took full advantage of his watershapes. In many instances,he set watergardens near swimming pools so those immersed ina fully architectural bodies of water would have a sense of con-nection to water in more natural forms.

THE POETRY OF SPACEThe work of Burle Marx is both powerful and effective, but

it’s also so intellectually complex that it’s impossible to describeall of its nuances and the depth of his many achievements. Thework is, in short, like the man himself – a personality so vividand a knowledge so vast that capturing its essence would takevolumes rather than these few pages.

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More on Burle Marx

The books on Roberto Burle Marx and his work are plenti-ful. My personal favorites include:

* Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956-1961by Anita Berrizbeitia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)

* Roberto Burle Marx: Landscapes Reflected by RossanaVaccarino (Princeton Architectural Press, 2000)

* A Picture of Roberto Burle Marx by Lawrence Fleming(Editora Index, 1996)

* Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Gardenby William Howard Adams (The Museum of ModernArt/Abrams, 1991)

* The Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx by Sima Eliovson(Timber Press, 2003)

* The Tropical Gardens of Burle Marx by P.M. Bardi (ReinholdPublishing, 1964)

– R.J.

Many of Burle Marx’s projects are overtly drawn from nature and theplants he found all around him in his native Brazil. There’s an eleganceto it – as well as clear references to the great Japanese gardens he soadmired – and an invitation to visitors to pause and relax. Again, thisapproach to natural forms fully engages my own creativity and has ledme to develop spaces that pay tribute to Burle Marx and other masterswho’ve gone before me.

Jungles

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For my part, I’ll always feel his presence in my work and theway I approach my life. On the occasions when I had the op-portunity to see him interact with clients – even when he wasspeaking Portuguese and I couldn’t understand everything hewas saying – I could always tell how he affected people and per-ceive the respect they had for him.

There was always a feeling that something very special andimportant was happening, and he translated those sensa-tions into the work at hand, weaving any space and the el-ements within it to create works of art that have stood thetest of time. These spaces will become increasingly impor-tant as time goes by and more and more people becomeaware of and feel his influence.

There will never be another like him, but he certainly has in-fluenced me and touched a great many other people throughhis work and in the way he approached his life. It’s all worthstudy by anyone who strives to create something special in de-signing and organizing spaces: Roberto Burle Marx may nolonger be here in the flesh, but his spirit lives on!