Ibirapuera Park

This guide to Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo follows a landscaping fight from 1953, when the city hired the world-famous Roberto Burle Marx to design the grounds for São Paulo's four-hundredth-anniversary celebrations. A change of mayor and a nervous budget pulled him off the job, and it fell instead to Otávio Augusto Teixeira Mendes, an agronomist newly back from Columbia University, to draw a fresh plan under pressure. He had months, not years, while crews were still clearing shacks off this land.