Roberto Burle Marx was a true (twentieth-century) Renaissance man: a painter, sculptor, set designer, environmental activist and, above all, leading pioneer of modernist landscape architecture in Brazil. In his sixty-year career, he designed more than two thousand gardens around the globe. Many of these—including this 1980s winter garden, designed for the rooftop of the Safra bank headquarters in São Paulo, and captured here by Leonardo Finotti—were inspired by abstract painting, and appear as boldly abstracted murals when seen from above.
