University of Buffalo Solar Park

2010 - Buffalo, NY, USA

University of Buffalo Solar Park

Buffalo, NY, USA

CLIENT University of Buffalo / New York Power Authority (NYPA) / STATUS Competition Finalist, 2010 / SIZE 6 acres / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Inc.

Balmori Associates with their proposal of “Public Power Park“ was chosen as one of three finalists out of 20 artists invited to compete for the design of a new ‘Solar Park’ by the university of Buffalo with the New York Power Authority (NYPA). The installation was required to use 5,000 solar panels within a landscape to produce energy for the student housing and proposed one of the largest on any campus in the United States. Balmori’s proposal addresses the nature of technological infrastructure, where nature and technology intersect and proposes a new kind of public space, one that is a programmed response to producing power, and powering public space.

Modeled after the lake effect, Solar Effects captures weather to produce power and public space. The lake effect marries wind, humidity, temperature and topography creating a powerful weather machine that shapes our collective experience of landscape. This phenomenon drifts through the sky painting the land with rain and snow.  The solar grid is pixilated and reordered along the flows of wind and people. The drifting arrangement and varying heights of the panels form a solar topography, optimized for peak power production.  Solar education and demonstration are embedded in the project. Water collects in the gently undulating meadows.  Mirrors dot the underside of the panels, sparkling in the sun and moonlight, further increasing the solar efficiency of the system.  Snow cones register snow and ice in playful sculptures embedded into the structure of the system and an interactive Solar Iceberg glows with the latest solar technologies.

Kuala Lumpur City Center/PETRONAS TOWERS

1999 - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur City Center/PETRONAS TOWERS

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

CLIENT Kuala Lumpur City / STATUS Completed 1999 / SIZE 97 acres / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates

The Kuala Lumpur Retail /Entertainment Complex and Atrium is part of the 97-acre Kuala Lumpur City Centre development, centrally located at the heart of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of the city.  Approximately half of the 97-acre site is devoted to public areas of park and garden, surrounded by 18 million square feet of commercial, retail, hotel, and recreational and residential development.

The central space, Petronas Plaza, is dedicated to a public garden, walled to protect it from encircling traffic. Formal lines of trees and fountains, organized around a series of linear elements aligning on the main axis of the Twin Towers, create an enclave for the public away from commercial development.

Interwoven geometric patterns animate the linear bands of paving inset with poetry; a variety of plant textures, colors and heights reinforce the space’s axial organization. The fountain elements are repeated at the base of the towers, linking the plaza’s two main areas. The fountains’ activities vary; the water, at times dripping, splashing or gushing, becomes a ballet of color and sound at night while providing during the day an active play environment for children and cool resting place in this hot climate.

United States Institute of Peace

2011 - Washington, DC, USA

United States Institute of Peace

Washington, DC, USA

CLIENT United States Institute of Peace / STATUS Completed 2011 / SIZE 114,300 SF / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Moshe Safdie and Associates

The Peace Institute’s landscape is designed as a garden; a garden that surrounds a circular foyer for groups to gather at the front of the Peace and Education Center. This foyer is contained, first of all, by semicircular benches which curve inwards around a long table with individual stools; contained beyond by “living walls” which separate the space from the two busy streets which intersect at its corner. The living walls are undulating walls of concrete which flow through the gardens and paths at various angles and heights. These inclined walls are draped with plants or contain pockets of planting. In several places they allow water to run down them and are lighted. These living walls serve several functions. They serve, first, as a line of security around the building’s perimeter. Second, they hide the constant movement of traffic around the two main streets by the site. Third, because they are planted they give the sense of a broader, thicker surface increasing the sensed distance from the traffic.

Flowering trees and perennials add their color and texture to the enclosure in white and purple. White as a symbol of peace and as a reassertion of the white color of the wing-like roof of Moshe Safdie’s building. Purple used with restraint sets up the white more dramatically. The plants have been also chosen for scent, so that visitors are enveloped in perfume, color, and water once they enter the precinct. Beyond the circular foyer, the public passes by the edge of the terrace which fronts the building, but which you can enter only from the inside. The edge of the terrace allows for a view at the exhibition space below. The terrace itself is an extension of the Great Hall within. At this point , the visitor has dramatic views of the atrium and its translucent hovering roof above. As the public ascends toward the entrance there are also long views toward the Institute’s gardens to the west.

University College Dublin

2007 - Dublin, Ireland

University College Dublin

Dublin, Ireland

CLIENT University College Dublin / STATUS Competition Finalist, 2007 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Zaha Hadid Architects 

In collaboration with Zaha Hadid, Balmori Associates submitted a master plan for the expansion of the University College in Dublin.  This design proposed hybridity as a strategy to create new building and landscape typologies.  Landscape and architecture merged to form continuous multi-layered public surfaces and green building facades.  The slopes that transitioned between the path and the buildings were exemplary of the thickening interface.  They were layered with plantings and materials and became usable and occupiable spaces that extend the landscape to a 5th facade of roof garden.  This interface also became a sustainable strategy that aimed to maximize campus biodiversity by extending existing green space and branching out to form a new campus green network. 

Meditation Room: Horizon

2015 - New York, NY, USA

MEDITATION ROOM: HORIZON

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT  The Drawing Center New Museum Biennial IDEAS CITY 2015 / SIZE 110 ft2 / 10 m2 / STATUS Completed 2015 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates

The Meditation Room project emerged from the exploration of the ideas of horizon and peripheral vision.

Meditation Room: Horizon was installed in Sara D. Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side of New York City, for one day -- Saturday, May 30, 2015.  Presented by The Drawing Center during the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival, the installation created the sense of an expansive horizon in the smallest of spaces.

Balmori Associates’ “Meditation Room: Horizon” is a constructed continuous wall of paper where the overlapping of two dot matrix systems comes together to create a visible horizon. A city is distinguished by the presence of multiple horizon lines stacked one over another. A task of landscape in the city then may be to create the sense of an expansive horizon in the smallest of spaces. You are invited to meditate on this concept of the horizon and to draw your interpretation.

 

Temporary Landscapes

Temporary Landscapes

All landscapes are temporary; everything around us is. Some landscapes are temporary by design: the viewing fence around Ground Zero, which will be removed when the construction planned for the site is completed, for example; or the temporary landscape built on a derelict site in Brooklyn, until the site is used for another, more permanent, project.

We see great value in temporary landscapes for cities. They can serve to try things out, change the character of the place, fast: the Garden That Climbs the Stairs in Bilbao was designed and built in three months. Temporary projects are also often low-budget interventions allowing for ideas to be tested. Realizing Robert Smithson Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island showed us the potential for the floating typology to occupy and negotiate shifting landscapes such as a river.

Hyperambulation

HYPERAMBULATION

With Hyperambulation BAL/LAB and Dr. Novella envision paths that are for rehabilitation as well as simply for the pleasure of walking. The paths can incorporate challenging topography to help restore a patients’ balance and timing; to correct gait or sequencing in running; and to improve strength and range of motion after a hip replacement, a back, knee, or ankle surgery or sprain.

Some paths maximize strength of specific muscle groups, such as ankles, calves, hamstrings and quads, or improve balance and flexibility. These paths are for healthy persons who wish to improve their potential speed, agility, or balance. These paths can be grouped, and then designated to improve performance of athletes such as racket sports players, football players, basketball players, runners, dancers, etc., or designated to improve strength and flexibility and balance.

These paths are designed as the basis for a landscape taking maximum advantage of the aesthetics of the local environment. Such a project can stimulate body and mind, and has universal appeal.  These paths can be incorporated into the existing grounds of parks or other public spaces, people’s backyards, in health spas, or hospital grounds. They can also serve as features to attract the public to sites developed as places of scenic beauty like national parks.

Green Roofs + Walls

GREEN ROOFS + WALLS

What’s all the fuss about green roofs? These roofs can be a modest planting, sometime of a single species.  Sedums are very resistant, can live on very little water and very shallow soil. This modest planting can create a microclimate. Microclimates are the ecological movement’s next frontier. The evapotranspiration from these plants lowers the ambient temperature on this roof resulting in a cooler place, requiring less air conditioning.  Furthermore the water from rain is absorbed by the plants and returned to the atmosphere or filtered through the soil, delaying it entry into the drainage system, lessening peak storm loads.

These green roofs can play the role of fifth facades in high rise cities like New York. Where people look down from above at other’s rooftops, green roofs become an aesthetic asset.  Let’s add to that, that it triples the lifespan of a roof; and that it traps air-borne pollutants, producing oxygen.

The big picture is that half of the world lives in cities; it will be 2/3 by 2025. Cities are major producers of all the things which are feeding climate change. Green roofs are a simple tool we could use to change this effect, if used at the macroscale. Green roofs can also play the urban role of open space and social connectors.

Representation Experiments

REPRESENTATION EXPERIMENTS

In landscape architecture, representation has become the subject of contention and much discussion. While computer techniques have been a catalyst for change across the field of design as a while, nowhere have the conventions of representation been called into question more than in landscape architecture- which in itself is undergoing a process of reinvention. With the onset of rapid urbanization and our shifting relationship with nature, landscape architecture has proved a potent lens for expressing a wider dialogue taking place in the world. It is, however, only through the introduction of innovative forms of representation- whether digital, analogue or hybrid- that one most vividly sees the emergence of the new. 

Floating Landscapes

FLOATING LANDSCAPES

Similar to green roofs or traffic medians, floating landscapes exist on the edges and underutilized spaces within cities.  Whereas green roofs exist as an intersection between landscape and architecture, floating islands are a model of the interface and transitions between the river, the landscape and the city. 

There are many social and ecological benefits to a network of floating islands or floating landscapes: They are exciting opportunities for new recreational public space. They can move to accommodate civic spaces and parks and serve different neighborhoods on a seasonal or weekly basis (rather than build redundant facilities throughout a city.) Islands act as sponges that filter and clean water and provide wildlife habitats in the city. Floating islands also adapt to and address rising seas. But we wondered: how could floating landscapes become financially sustainable?

Floating landscapes could offer a framework for an infrastructure to capture the energy of waves and currents. And they could also grow food! The great Aztec civilizations produced agriculture on artificial floating chinampas and Bangladesh developed floating societies. Thailand’s floating markets are tourist and local economic drivers. Vice President for Botanical Science and Director and Philecology Curator of the Institute of Economic Botany at New York Botanical Garden, Dr. Michael Balick suggested growing herbs. Herbs are low maintenance compared to other crops and have a financial return that could make the floating landscape an economically viable scheme.

Balmori Associates produced Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island for the Whitney Museum and the Smithson Estate in 2006. The project, which takes a piece of Central Park and places it on a barge to travel around Manhattan showed the potential for the floating typology to occupy and negotiate shifting landscapes such as a river. In St. Louis, Balmori Associates, with engineering support from Consulmar Marine Engineers, developed a master plan with public space on floating islands and docks that would rise with the level of the Mississippi River. In 2013 in the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Balmori Associates collaborated with Floating Island International and PennDesign (University of Pennsylvania) to install floating island prototypes made from a matrix of non-woven fibers from recycled plastic PET drinking bottles and a buoyant marine PVC that are non-toxic to marine life.

In 2014, Balmori Associates received a $20,000 grant to research and create a productive garden in the most polluted canal in the United States, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. Once a hub for Brooklyn maritime and commercial activity the Gowanus Canal has captured industrial waste products from factories located along its banks and other polluted surface run-off and sewage waste from its adjacent neighborhoods. Balmori Associates’ aim is to clean water through phytoremediation and collect rainwater to irrigate the floating productive garden. Different buoyant construction materials have been tested such as coconut fibers, water hyacinth, bamboo, Ecovative mycelium technology, and matrix of recycled plastic.

Our ultimate goal is to show the viability of producing edible floating landscapes at a large scale in cities with polluted rivers and to explore their urban potential as a multi-functional green infrastructure capable of providing public space, biodiverse habitats, and shoreline protection, in addition to food and energy production. 

684 Broadway

2007 - NEW YORK, NY, USA

684 BROADWAY

NEW YORK, NY, USA

CLIENT Matthew A Blesso, Blesso Properties / SIZE 3,100sf / 288 m2 / STATUS Completed in 2007 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Joel Sanders Architect /  ANDarchitects Architect / R2P Studio / PHOTO CREDIT Mark J.Dye

The project at 684 Broadway explores the interface of built and natural environment of architecture and landscape; not blurring the line between landscape and architecture, but widening it. This thick interface creates the opportunity for new types of spaces. Alternating sheaves of landscape and building on both horizontal and vertical planes create transitions within this widened line. It is a complex interface that is layered – the thicker the line the better – and results in a new spatial entity. Interface becomes a sustainable strategy that aims to maximize biodiversity and sustainable design in this urban site by extending green space both horizontally and vertically within the renovated apartment and exterior roof space. The result, hypernature, is an artificial spectacle of constructed nature. 

The interface begins with an interior garden beneath a twenty foot long skylight. Filled with large leaved Elephant Ears and black bamboo, the plants create an ascending green carpet beneath the floating stairs to the roof. Above the delicate bamboo fronds, through a glass partition separating the garden from master bathroom, is visible a green wall planted with euonymus. This improbable swath of vertical vegetation climbs the wall colliding with a second skylight through which is visible the rooftop planting.

Suspended above the sea of grasses is a bi-level ipe deck. On the lower level a small gravel path leads to a look out pod with views over the lower east side, an outdoor shower and on the opposite side of the stair bulkhead, a more private enclave with jacuzzi and sunning deck. Five steps lead to the upper level with an outdoor kitchen and grill lounging space. Opposite the parapet, the bulkhead rises into the sky. Densely planted with stepable plants one can lie on the slope and watch cloud rushing overhead. A staircase leads to the top from which there is a 360 degree view of the Lower East side.