This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "Green Thumb."

© Cesar Barreto (left); Burle Marx & Cia. Ltda., Rio de Janeiro. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved (right)

This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "Green Thumb."At any given moment when walking through Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist at the Jewish Museum in New York, one may hear a soft rushing of waves, mixed with the murmur of an open-air crowd. A narration in Portuguese, both spoken and sung, will drift breezily in and out. This is the soundscape of Plages, a 2001 video by artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Shot from an aerial perspective above Copacabana Beach, the film shows the popular Rio de Janeiro waterfront not in its usual sunlit splendor but in the artificially lit nocturne of New Year?s Eve 2000. Celebrators teem in the space between city and ocean, in the moment between one year and the next, moving in dynamic patterns amid the immense designs laid out by Roberto Burle Marx.
The Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909?1994) worked in a variety of artistic mediums, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and mosaics. Image © TYBA

For almost half a century, Copacabana Beach?s vast sweeps of mosaics have animated the Rio waterfront. Plages, however, reveals little of its iconic setting. Onl...