Burle Marx

Question 1,

Both Laurie Olin and Peter Walker discuss the genius of Andre Le Notre. Simo and Walker say of him, via a discussion of Roberto Burle Marx, that he "...places objects on a plane not to glorify the object but to express the plane itself. And however enriched with patterning and planting the plane remains taut."

What is meant by this? Can you find examples in contemporary garden design or landscape architecture that express this?

I think Burle Marx using the landscape and the ground from which he built his art is a sort of metaphor for the constant struggle of man against nature, the man made sculpture on the natural plane of the ground. The landscape glorifies whatever is placed upon it and the beauty of the object built upon the plane is subject to the person viewing them. I think his art in his later years was also a response to the often overgrown and hard to manage landscapes that he created in his early years. The single object and the plane was a simple idea that exemplified the nature of landscapes and objects placed on them. He seems to use hostility in his art to show struggle. To me the single object on a landscape enhances the natural landscape more and shows the struggle between something that was not formed organically from the earth, such as a statue or wall in a garden, and the natural organic lay of the land. He was trying to call attention to the simple beauty of the land itself which I think is a beautiful approach. His simplification would make more of an impact on me than the density of his early work and to let the viewer see more clearly the inherent beauty and structure of the land that he was working with rather than it to be covered in dense vegetation. However I think the dense planting gardens of his early career was a direct translation of his view of the Brazilian landscape. It’s interesting to think about what might lay underneath all of that vegetation in the Amazon and to truly see the bare and naked landscape of South America. I could see how Marx could have progressed to minimalism from growing up surrounded by density and high growth. I think it was only natural for him to eventually reach a place where he was interested in glorifying the simplest of the land and its taut plane.