The exhibit of work by Roberto Burle Marx, the legendary Brazilian landscape architect, at Rooster Gallery is called Tablecloth, after a large canvas one he painted in the 1960’s that’s been cleaned, stretched and given pride of place in the small gallery.  Burle Marx is best known for designing the park Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo and for his collaborations with architect Oscar Niemeyer and planner Lucio Costa, including the grounds of several civic buildings in Brasilia.  The tablecloth, along with the seven other paintings in the show, were gifts from Burle Marx to José Ramoa, a Portuguese art collector and close friend.  At the opening reception the tablecloth, rendered in dizzying, overlapping patterns, made a stylish backdrop for patrons strolling back and forth with capirinhas in hand.

When you look at a painting by an architect (like one by Le Corbusier, or Michael Graves, or Zaha Hadid), you’re likely to find the same forms they employ in their architecture, but lacking their dynamism.  Somehow these architects aren’t always able to capture the life of their architecture in their art; their two-dimensional works are unnaturally dulled.  So I was surprised to see Burle Marx’s smaller paintings, which have a dense, sculptural sensibility altogether different from his landscape designs.  You can spot similar amoeba-like geometries in both, to be sure, but the paintings boast a spatial complexity that’s different in character from his best-known garden designs, which seem to be primarily graphic.  Is there more life in this great landscape architect’s paintings than in his gardens?

It’s easy to forget that we have our own piece of Le Corbusier right here in New York.  That would be the United Nations buildings, which he designed in collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer and Wallace K. Harrison.  Maybe the buildings are so easy to forget because they’re so hard to see.  These are monumentally-scaled buildings squeezed into four narrow riverside blocks east of First Avenue in midtown.  There’s no spot from where a pedestrian can take in the General Assembly’s swooping roof, the platonic slab of the Secretariat, and the yawning grace of the library.  Corb was an expert at plastic compositions, so it’s particularly frustrating not to get a comprehensive view of the buildings.  To see them their best, they’d need more air around them, like Corb’s government buildings at Chandigarh.

Approaching the UN on foot is dispiriting.  Because of increased security and a two-billion-dollar renovation that’s underway, the driveway, garden and waterside park have all been closed off, with the same type of metal barricades the NYPD uses at parades, only painted UN blue.  To get inside you pass through an unhappy maze of plywood ramps and white tents that have been set up in the middle of the public plaza.  But inside the General Assembly (shown above when it first opened in 1952),  you pass under floating boomerang-shaped balconies, soaked in light from the glass endwall, and get a hint of how delicious it all could be.  Right now the expansive ground hall is poorly used, with exhibit spaces, a stamp counter, and a wall with framed portraits of all the UN Secretary Generals.  When I visited Korean tourists were lined up to have their picture taken next to the likeness of Ban Ki-moon.  The wood-lined basement, darker and quieter, could also be a great space, but it’s cluttered with tchotchke shops and a cafeteria that fills both floors with the smell of stale food.  With this renovation, the UN has an opportunity to transform its icnonic mid-century interior into a dazzling social space, and to make world peace seem just a little more glamorous.