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Ministério da Educação e Saúde

1938–1944, Rio de Janeiro
Today: Palácio Gustavo Capanema
Landscape architecture: Roberto Burle Marx
Architecture: Lucio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, Ernani Vasconcellos, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier

The Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro is the first modernist public building in Latin America. It was developed by a team of Brazilian architects brought together by Lucio Costa, with the collaboration of Le Corbusier. Roberto Burle Marx received the contract to design the gardens. His first designs take their bearings from the strong orthogonal geometry of Le Corbusier’s sketches. In 1942, he prepares a new set of designs, characterised by the organic forms that would define his style through to the mid-1950s. His gouache plan of the rooftop garden looks like an abstract painting. A variety of sources are thought to have inspired his use of organic forms. The art of the European avant-garde that Burle Marx came into contact with from 1928 to 1929 in Berlin was clearly one of them. The different colours mark out areas that are to be densely planted with one particular type of plant. These areas of mass planting contrast with each other in colour, texture, or volume. A later plan to extend the garden and add a pond was never realised. Along with the building it accompanied, Burle Marx’s garden design gained international renown.