Cannibalizing Le Corbusier: The MES Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx

<jats:p>In 1938 Roberto Burle Marx designed the gardens for the new Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro, a building that had been designed by a team of Brazilian architects, with Le Corbusier acting as consultant. In the 1920s and 1930s, Brazilian radicals, anxious not to perpetuate the dependency of the past, often adopted an irreverent attitude toward European culture, and although Le Corbusier's visits to Brazil in 1929 and 1936 were undoubtedly influential, his ideas were not received uncritically. This paper suggests that Le Corbusier's negative attitude to aspects of the natural landscape of South America could have provided Burle Marx with an incentive for incorporating the forms of that landscape into his gardens for Brazil's first modernist skyscraper.</jats:p>