Opinion
Roberto Burle Marx’s High-Speed Garden
THE DAILY PIC: At the Jewish Museum, Marx merges biomorphs and streamlining.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1575): The Jewish Museum is hosting a fascinating exhibition of the Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx, who’s a hero of modernist design at home but almost unknown here in the United States. This is his never-executed 1948 design for the garden of the Santa Barbara beach house of American collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine. The garden is built around biomorphic forms, which if you think about it has a lovely circularity to it (as it were): Forms borrowed from nature, and valued for their anti-geometric freedom, are repurposed by Burle to create a thoroughly controlled, almost technologized landscape. Looking at his plan, you realize that classic biomorphs and industrial streamlining, which came of age at about the same moment, had a surprising overlap. (© Burle Marx Landscape Design Studio, Rio de Janeiro, reproduced with permission, all rights reserved)
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