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Fascinated by the greatness of the land he founds in his first trip to America, in 1929, Le Corbusier draws incessantly: buildings, cities, people, rivers, hills, slums. The Sugar Loaf appears in many of his drawings. One of them stands out and calls our attention because of the relation it establishes between architecture and nature. Actually, there are four drawings in a roll: the Sugar Loaf; the Sugar Loaf and a palm tree; the Sugar Loaf, a palm tree and a tree seen by a man sitting in an armchair; and finally, the Sugar Loaf, a palm tree and a tree seen by a man in an armchair through a big glass sheet. This sequence of drawings reveals Le Corbusier's concept of architecture and landscape. His thought would later constitute the central landmark of modern architecture in Brazil. In these drawings, landscape is clearly built through architecture. This work carries the modern definition of the relation between architecture and nature: architecture edits nature, organizing it, measuring it and giving it a meaning, and at the same time is distinguished, defining itself as a product of culture, i.e. a product of human technique and reasoning. Comfortably sitting in an armchair, the only piece of furniture in a bright and aseptic room, completely projected, dimensioned and controlled, Le Corbusier's man contemplates nature through architecture. This way, he withdraws himself from the brutality surrounding him and is protected from the so feared Tropical excesses (the greatness, the never ending sun, rain, vegetation, dust, insects, etc.). But he escapes isolation when his eyes reach this same nature – now with a value added to it – through the glass sheet placed in front of him: it's not a window, paradigm of the perspective illusionism, but a glass curtain, paradigm of modern space in architecture. It is as if this man said: architecture and landscape both are product of my intellect. Or: "landscape is culture, before being nature".(1) But while landscape usually infers movement – alluded by the ship crossing the bay in the first drawing, or by the vegetation framing the Sugar Loaf in the following ones –, this one tends to stability. There is no sign of turbulence, unbalance or entropy. Not now, nor later. It is as if, within architecture, the incessant movement of nature were finally dominated and tamed. After all, it is up to architecture to balance landscape. In Brazil, however, the ground still has to be balanced. That is the role of gardens, or rather, Roberto Burle Marx's landscaping compositions: highly structured, they offer a balanced basis essential to the development of modern architecture in a physical and cultural domain that is as unstable as uncertain, shapeless and resistant to all kinds of stable configuration. Thus the enormous work – not always evident at a first site – dedicated to his gardens, in an attempt to discipline and civilize a nature that does not easily yield to human will. In the Residence of Edmundo Cavanellas, for example, projected by Oscar Niemeyer in Pedro do Rio (1954), the well limited and trimmed plot of grass alludes to the tradition of the classic French garden: a garden that does not intend to be contaminated and that requires a severe maintenance routine – as a great part of the modern architecture in Brazil. In fact, not few modern works in Brazil tend to ignore the flow of time (insisting on an eternal present, as in Niemeyer) or to reduce its significance (requiring a permanent maintenance to be kept at all cost, as in the Roberto brothers). The way this problem is understood by Burle Marx helps explain his absolute protagonism within the field of modern architecture in Brazil. While there are others who dedicate themselves to landscaping in the country, such as Mina Klabin or Waldemar Cordeiro, their work is infinitively more punctual and discrete, and in many ways incomparable to the public dimension achieved by Burle Marx's. Anyhow, there are some issues that imbricate modern architecture and landscape in Brazil in a very singular way within the wider domain of architectonic modernity. Thus, while the absence of Burle Marx's reference in Le Corbusier may be astonishing, it is important to consider how distinct their landscape concepts actually are. Developed in the European cultural environment, Le Corbusier's thought is built on grounds that are highly shaped – in his understanding, contaminated – by an urban tradition, from which the architectonic object must free itself in a simultaneous strategy of formal refinement. Hence the use of pilotis that elevate the architectonic object off the ground and gestaltically detach its pure shape against unlimited and indistinct sky and ground, a neutral and uniform background called "green space" by Le Corbusier. This opposes to an entire landscaping tradition and to the notion of garden itself, so widely associated with the Garden City Movement being left behind.(2) The green can also be suspended in solariums conceived as an artificial ground or a building's fifth façade, as in Villa Savoye (1928). Or "some beautiful trees" can be placed in front of "clean façades"(3) – trees, not gardens; i.e. vertical elements that work as a counterpoint to the horizontality of the ribbon windows seen by Le Corbusier as one of the principles of the new architecture. In Brazil, however, garden and building overlap each other, merge together, and are confounded, leading to an even higher degree of reversibility between indoors and outdoors claimed by modern architecture. This can already be seen in 1930, in Lucio Costa's drawings for the second version of Casa Fontes, where individual columns, which could have been extracted from Villa Savoye, present themselves totally covered with ivies. Here, it is not enough to project the building alone; the land must also be projected - recreating it as to offer a safe platform for modern architecture, containing/limiting a horizon that is too wide, and an environment that resists any kind of formalization. The problems appear when this landscape concept, an essentially modern one, meets a contemporary concept of art. The result can be disastrous, as in Inhotim, where Burle Marx landscaping tends to frame works that don't stand framing. However, this is not what happens to Eduardo Coimbra's work in Pampulha, where the discussion of modern landscape concept and the assentment to architecture, already intrinsic to his artistic performance, reappear ready to disturb limits and concepts modeled by modern architecture, in one of its most famous spaces. Initially, there is no important intervention on the landscape created by Niemeyer and Burle Marx, which stays intact, faithful to its condition as a monument. The game only begins at the entrance of the casino/museum, when the modern notion of landscape is challenged, together with central concepts of modern architecture. The operation involves displacement and transposition/transplantation: of established limits, which are continuously tensioned and reverted; of heterogeneous materials (plastic, soil, grass), which are moved from outdoors to indoors; of the sight, which glides incessantly among Pampulha's fragments, searching for stability. It is this same stability we look for when we step into the Museum, where the smallest oversight, a slip-up is enough to make us trip over the small vases full of grass that invade the hall. Vases or cups? It's hard to decide. Not vases, nor cups. Not even pots, maybe bowls. Anyway, small disposable containers made of clear plastic. While their arrangement on the floor constitutes a soft green carpet interrupted only by the sinuous line that elongates Burle Marx and Niemeyer's curves, they violate Pampulha's scale and exceptionality, and almost profane it, due to their elementariness and vulgarity. Opposing to the timeless and highly authorial character of the Pampulha architectural complex, they are massively produced and consumed containers that can be found in any supermarket, cost almost nothing and nobody expects them to last long. Poor and unexpressive, fragile and banal, they don't deserve to be reused, and do not seem worthy of Burle Marx and Niemeyer's work, meant to be eternal. Given a new function, they carry living fragments of Pampulha's landscape, as improper miniatures of the surrounding garden, subverting its greatness. Considering the geometric curves of Burle Marx's gardens, the masses of concrete, the unitary shape, the bold gesture and the structural efforts of Niemeyer's architecture, the cups astonish with their discontinuousness, lack of density and cohesion, which, on the other hand, take us back to a refusal to rooting, characteristic of Niemeyer's architecture. Carried into the Museum, the rootless green is baffling, leaving behind variations and combinations (of color, shades, textures, species) that liven up Burle Marx's landscaping compositions. And, once more, the artist's operation on the landscape is performed by means of materials that are completely strange to the architecture constituting it: the adhesive tape, in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (Collage, 2000); the soil, in the Contemporary Art Museum in Niterói (Invention of Landscape, 1998); and here, the cups – or whatever they might be. These are abased, ephemeral and instable materials that transgress the eternity and the stability claimed by modern architecture, and even dare mock it. But they also drive our eyes towards works that are so hallowed that risk becoming crystallized. Shuffled by means of multiple optical mechanisms, the landscape carefully built by Niemeyer and Burle Marx loses a lot of its distinction through the progressive occupation of the Museum's spaces: from the grass that invades and crosses the entrance hall to the mirrors on the suspended mezzanine and from there to the light boxes in the darkness of the auditorium. While the landscape, successively cut and fragmented, is finally reintegrated into a panoramic view, what bothers now is the strange luminosity of the photos, emitted by a light source hidden behind the panels and intensified by the total absence of opening to the outdoors. The longer we observe these photos (eight large pictures, acting in juxtapositional pairs), the more they gain contours and let themselves be seen. But Niemeyer and Burle Marx's exuberant shapes end up being muffled and what we see is nothing but the atmosphere resulting from the almost monochromatic weighted means of all the elements constituting Pampulha's landscape today: the gardens, the stones, the sky, the water, Niemeyer's architecture, and the soothing constructions in the surroundings. With no depth of field, the images force the body to leave the building and step outside, for a breath of fresh air and natural light. This way, the landscape is at all times a functioning response, crossed by the constant stimulus of the eyes of those who search in vain for a stable point in this ambiguous museum/casino/observatory, fated to have a short life. This way, the interruption of a sense of permanence and contemplation, traditionally associated with the museum as well as with the landscape, not only prevents the contemplative posture of the corbusierian man, but also challenges the museological institutions' conservatism. Even the apparently trivial bench, located in front of the glass curtain on the mezzanine, is tricking, as if it were possible to detach it from its functional identity, together with the cups (?) on the first floor. Until when will these small cups be here? I imagine the organic matter contained in them will end up bursting their thin plastic walls. I would like to take them home and offer them 2011 obs: paper presented at a round table at MAP/Pampulha Art Museum, on November 19th 2011, during the exhibition Museu:observatório (Museum:observatory), by Eduardo Coimbra, curated by Renata Marquez. notes:
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