RIO DE JANEIRO is a place with jungles, forests and all kind of plants, flowers and trees. Today the Brazilian Landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along and organizing native plants in accordance with aesthetic principles, especially Cubism  and abstractionism. He created a modern grammer for international landscape design.

Burle Marx always thought og himself first as a painter. Landscape design, he once wrote ” was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawings and paintings, using less conventional materials.

One of Burle Marx’s tapestries, on view at the Paço Imperial museum.

Paintings on cloth hanging in the Paço Imperial.

It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as scrub and brush was truly extraordinary.

Burle Marx is also known for his many ambitious projects in Rio. The city’s largest park, the bayside Aterro do Flamengo, left, is an early example of one of his signature projects.

Nothing surpasses the sidewalks of Copacabana, left, with colorful abstract stone mosaics extending unbroken the entire length of the famous beach. Viewed from above, Burle Marx appears to have painted a single canvas four miles long.

A view of Aterro do Flamengo.