Review: Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable Available to Purchase

Landscape architecture—or perhaps the landscape—features prominently in contemporary design discourses. Seemingly all-encompassing, landscape practitioners intervene on post-industrial sites and regions; they envision scenarios for shrinking cities, hypercities, informal settlements, and shifting riparian zones. It should then come as no surprise that the frequency with which landscape is addressed by curators has recently increased, with Rising Currents at MoMA; Stadtgrün at the Frankfurt Architecture Museum; ManMade Environment initiated by Oslo’s DogA and later shown in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and now Helsinki; and La Ville fertile and Roberto Burle Marx at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris. This sampling reflects not only the wide range of scales—garden to waterfront—that characterizes designing with/in the landscape but also the competing claims on landscape, greening, and sustainability by landscape architects, architects, and artists. In this fuzzy context, Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable, to whose catalogue this reviewer contributed an essay without in any...