Ibirapuera Park, Quadricentennial Gardens, project, São Paulo, Brazil (Plan, detail five)

Roberto Burle Marx

1953

A gouache-on-board project plan for the Quadricentennial Gardens at São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park in which Roberto Burle Marx translates landscape ideas—paths, pools, and planting beds—into a bold, abstract arrangement of color and shape.

It reads like a jewel-like aerial map: sweeping green margins, angular blue 'water' shapes, a rhythmic diamond-pattern band, and clusters of vivid geometric blocks that suggest planted beds and hardscape as pure pictorial elements.

The drawing exemplifies how Burle Marx fused modernist painting principles with landscape design, treating public parks as large-scale compositions and helping to elevate landscape architecture as an artistic practice influential in Brazil and beyond.

Palette

Art Terms

Gouache Architectural drawing Plan drawing Landscape Geometric abstraction Architecture Abstraction

Exhibitions

Latin American Architecture Since 1945

1955

Brazil Builds

1943

From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer: 1929–1949

1949

Painting and Sculpture in Architecture

1949