The Winter Garden at the World Financial Center

2002 - New York, NY, USA

The Winter Garden at the World Financial Center

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Olivia and York, World Financial Center / STATUS Completed 1988, Restored 2002 / SIZE 18,000 SF / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Pelli Cesar Pelli

The Winter Garden in Battery Park City’s World Financial Center serves as the cultural center of the 3.5-acre complex. This glass hall is the main connector of all public circulation within the project and with the World Trade Center site. Its success as a public space is due in part to its dedicated programming staff; Balmori Associates worked closely with them, carefully laying out all the activities desired in the space before designing its paving, landscape, and circulation.

After suffering severe damage in the September 11th attacks, the Winter Garden underwent a $50 million renovation, reopening a year later. The passageway leading to the World Trade Center has been replaced by a glass façade, providing a new entryway to the space as well as a view of Ground Zero. Visitors to the garden descend a huge semi-circular staircase from the upper level to the palm grove below. The garden’s glass walls are lined with shops and restaurants; movable public seating can be adjusted around the space’s perimeter. Newly created galleries along the walls host exhibitions.

Sixteen palms are planted in a rectilinear grove, with the floor around them paved in diagonal patterns of imported marble. The palm variety is Washingtonia Robusta, a native American tree with a narrow trunk and lush foliage, rugged enough to withstand the hall’s dry environment and wide temperature range.

Fashion Institute of Technology

2003 - New York, NY, USA

Fashion Institute of Technology

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Fashion Institute of Technology  / STATUS Competition Entry 2003 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Joel Sanders Architect 

Woven or knitted, textiles link the diverse disciplines and departments that make up FIT, from fashion (fabric) to painting (canvas). Hence, the theme of textiles informed our entry to an invited competition for a new interdepartmental classroom building at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Our well-dressed building is clad in an ensemble of materials – woven glass on the exterior and gold carpeting and upholstery on the interior – to weave together a series of interactive spaces for the FIT community. From the soaring street-level atrium to the administrative roof terrace, this golden “thread” defines a continuous circulation path through the building, activated along its length by multipurpose student activity zones.  The project is fully sustainable, featuring natural ventilation, daylight, and green roofs, all aimed at improving quality of life while increasing energy efficiency. The building’s unique cladding creates a breathable membrane that shields the building from the elements while permitting it to draw energy and air directly from the outside environment.  

Duke University Central Campus Master Plan

2011 - Durham, NC, USA

Duke University Central Campus Master Plan

Durham, NC, USA

CLIENT Duke University / STATUS Completed 2011 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Pelli Clarke Pelli 

The New Campus landscape will follow the founding principals and identity of Duke University, for which it is so successful and appreciated, as a University of buildings connected to the land, as thoroughly described in the recently published Duke University Landscape Guidelines. The New Campus will respond to the existing Piedmont topography and landscape of Hollows and rolling hills, and seek to bring together the West and East Campuses by blending their respective legacies of a University in the Forest and a University in the Park. Natural drainage systems and ecological patterns will be preserved and enhanced through thoughtful landscape design, forest management and the use of native vegetative cover. Open spaces and tree-shaded allées will create visual and physical connectivity with the forested spaces, creating a blend of forest and habitable space that weaves between the architecture.

The New Campus will emphasize University connectivity by providing landscaped pedestrian ways to historic East and West Campuses, as well as bicycle and public transportation routes, and finding its own unique character through a focus on sustainability. The New Campus will link forested spaces and restore the natural environment so that the system may better perform ecological services including stormwater management and pollution filtering, while providing enigmatic landscapes that make Duke a “living laboratory”.  In this way, the New Campus can be a visual display of ecological processes that informs academic study, campus enjoyment and the replication of similar sustainability models elsewhere at Duke University, as well as beyond. 

The Solaire

2003 -New York, NY, USA

The Solaire

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Albanese Development Corporation  / SIZE 9,530 SF / STATUS Completed 2003 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Pelli Clarke Pelli

As the first ‘green’ residential high-rise in the United States, the Solaire building has introduced a new intercon­nection between architecture, its urban setting, and landscape in sustainable design. Balmori Associates col­laborated with the design architects, Cesar Pelli & Associates, to incorporate ecologically beneficial green roofs and a hydrological system into the infrastructure of the building.

Balmori Associates employed two types of green roofs for Solaire: an extensive vegetated roof, or a covering of groundcovers and sedums in 4” of growing medium; and an intensive green roof, which has deeper planting beds for a variety of vegetation ranging from perennials to bamboo trees. Located on the 19th floor, the inten­sively planted rooftop provides outdoor public space for the residents of the building, high above the city.

There are many ecological benefits to the inclusion of the greens roofs. They absorb solar heat which in turn lowers the building’s temperature, saving energy, and helping to mitigate the urban heat island effect. Rainwater is absorbed by the vegetation, reducing the amount of storm water entering the municipal system, and is cleaned of heavy metals and pollution in the process. The excess run-off is collected in a basement cistern, along with the building’s grey water, and is later used to irrigate the green roofs as necessary and is channelled to nearby parks.

Balmori Associates was given a 2004 Green Roof Award of Excellence for their design by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. The Solaire was the first building to be designed in response to an ambitious set of new guide­lines for green architecture developed by the Battery Park City Authority. It has been awarded a Gold Leed Rating and received New York State’s Green Building Tax Credit. In 2002, Solaire was one of five projects selected by the United States Department of Energy to represent the nation at the International Green Building Challenge in Oslo, Norway.

Cleveland Clinic Lerner Institute Courtyard

1998 - Cleveland, OH, USA

Cleveland Clinic Lerner Institute Courtyard

Cleveland, OH, USA

CLIENT The Cleveland Clinic Foundation / SIZE 1.5 acres / STATUS Completed 1998 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Inc, / Cesar Pelli Associates

Two parallel paths stretch down the Green, fronting the new 14-story Cleveland Clinic building across the street. The Green is the complex’s unifying core, around which future additions will take place. The paths, lined with benches and trees, are narrow enough to facilitate contact between those sitting across from each other. Careful plantings manipulate perception; telescoping lines of trees mimic perspective, making the green seem longer than it when viewed from the clinic building.

At the other end, a circle of flowering trees closes the perspective. Seen from the highest floors of the clinic, the oval becomes a perfect circle. At ground level, it creates a small, enclosed landscape within the overall linear pattern, suitable for intimate gatherings.

The plant material is appropriate for a campus. White Oaks will become sculptural giants to anchor and frame the whole landscape 50 years hence; Sweetgum will offer fall color; Techny Arborvitae will provide green in the winter; and crab apples supply both spring flowers and fall color. These materials were also chosen for salt tolerance. Two paths, paved with granite and lined with teak benches, travel the full length of the green and serve as circulation corridors between the clinic buildings.

The Highline Park

2003 - New York, NY, USA

The Highline Park

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Friends of the Highline / STATUS Competition Finalist, 2nd Place, 2003  / SIZE 1.5 miles / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Zaha Hadid Architects, SOM, Studio MDA, Studio MDA, Merill LLP

When The High Line is redeveloped, it will bring an exciting range of new spaces into play for New Yorkers. The team recognizes that the qualities of movement through these spaces will define the potentials of The High Line, and that understanding these must be the primary outcome of the design work.The redevelopment of the High Line demanded multidisciplinary teamwork at the highest levels of creativity and design experience. The team established by Zaha Hadid Architects, Balmori Associates, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP and studioMDA linked together these world-class offices with substantial building experience into a networked studio for excellence in urban design.

Each of these offices is renowned for well-defined strengths and specializations, and yet together they have discovered a common language and approach in responding to the spatial and temporal challenges underlying the project. The creative adaptation and reuse of old structures typically requires that we suspend our preconceptions of their uses and qualities, and one of the best ways of opening our thinking to new possibilities occurs through the thoughtful process of graphic abstraction for which Zaha Hadid’s office is famous. The team discovered a natural synergy in this approach, for it enabled open discussion of a complex range of issues and details long before deciding on specific uses and placements. 

Building an Urban Living Room Come Se Gallery

2010 - Rome, Italy

Building an Urban Living Room Come Se Gallery

Rome, Italy

CLIENT Galleria di Architettura “Come Se” / STATUS Design completed in NY in 2009, Exhibition in Rome June/July 2010/ DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Civico Zero & Save the Children

What should a public space be, asked Balmori in an online twitter forum with invited landscape architect Erik de Jong, planner Arnold van der Valk and their 40 Dutch students. We extended the conversation to the Meatpacking District, the neighborhood of our office, by participating in New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, “Conflux City 2009”. The ideas we collected on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness were broadcasted in a short video on blogs including the New York Architectural League’s Urban Omnibus.

With these ideas we developed design principles for the Urban Living Room:

Re-use materials – design to avoid waste create rough, industrial aesthetics

Keep it simple – Low tech and inexpensive construction and maintenance

Anticipate changing requirements – plan for easy reconfiguration The Urban Living Room is made of simple, inexpensive and interchangeable elements – a base, a pole, a canopy – to perform the functions of planter, shading, space partition, seating, lighting, rainwater collector…and even a birdhouse. Put together, these components create a public place, a space where one can linger, relax, and just be.

In 2010 Balmori Associates took the Urban Living Room to the first edition of Rome Architecture Festival, La Festa dell’ Architettura di Roma. Balmori Associates provided the organization “Civico Zero / Save The Children Italia” with guidelines for the construction of an Urban Living Room. The children and adolescents of the association, who recently arrived in Rome from Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, often homeless, sometime without papers, and who do not speak Italian or English, built their Urban Living Room.

Diagrams of the components indicated Materials a barrel filled with gravels and cement or with soil when used as a planter, galvanized steel poles, rubber mats made from tires for the seats, and sail cloth for the canopy and partition. But materials on hand in Rome were different from the ones originally selected for the New York City project: the barrel was replaced by cars and trucks’ wheels, the poles were orange PVC construction pipes, and the canopy and lightshade were made from an olive collecting net. Hosted by the Architecture Gallery, Come Se, the Urban Living Room opened in June 2010 accompanied by photographs telling the story of the construction of the Urban Living Room taken by one of the adolescents of Save The Children, the young Ivoirian, Mohamed Keita.

Earth Pledge

2002 - New York, NY, USA

Earth Pledge

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Earth Pledge Foundation / STATUS Completed 2002 / SIZE 975 SF / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Licalzi Consulting Engineers, Mark Licalzi / MGA Architecture, Walter Radtke

The construction of the Earth Pledge (EP) Kitchen Garden green roof inspired Earth Pledge, a New York City not- for profit, to embark on the Green Roofs Initiative, its ongoing project to facilitate green roof development in New York City as an ecologically sound and economically viable solution to urban and environmental problems.

In 1998 Earth Pledge renovated a 1902 Georgian Townhouse to serve both as their office showcase for sustainable materials and technologies.  Over 70 companies contributed.  Diana Balmori, principal of the landscape design firm Balmori Associates proposed a green roof system atop the new Workspace project.  An avid gardener, Earth Pledge’s Executive Director, Leslie Hoffman, immediately adopted the idea, seeing it as a beautiful means of dovetailing the organization’s two central programs of Sustainable Agriculture and Cuisine and Sustainable Architecture and Design

Earth Pledge and Diana Balmori partnered to design the roof to suit EP’s needs. Balmori designed the roof to highlight the wide variety of plant life available for green roofs, including native flowers and vegetables.  The design exploited the unexpected juxtaposition of its midtown Manhattan locale with the principles of organic gardening.  Herbs and flowers were planted in parapet planter boxes around the perimeter of the roof to increase the amount of growing area.   

Since its initial design and construction, the Kitchen Garden has evolved to reflect EP’s diverse interests.  The northern plot remains devoted to annual vegetables, including heirloom tomatoes and eggplants, and perennials such as beebalm, lavender and sage, taking advantage of its “semi-intensive” depth of 8-12” of substrate.  The southern plot, with a depth of 2-4” of growing medium, has been converted to a more typical “roof meadow” style green roof, featuring several varieties of sedum.  This “extensive” portion of the roof is a model for the kind of low-maintenance green roof infrastructure that the Green Roofs Initiative facilitates and promotes.   Meanwhile, the northern garden plot continues to demonstrate horticultural possibilities for stronger roof structures in New York City. 

The Earth Pledge green roof embodies the basic principles behind the Green Roof Initiative: that it is possible to create sustainable, beautiful solutions to pressing urban problems.  As New York City becomes a center for green roof development, the Earth Pledge roof will continue to evolve and thrive.

Talgar Master Plan

2007 - Talgar, Kazakhstan

Talgar Master Plan

Talgar, Kazakhstan

CLIENT Alau Co. LLP / STATUS Competition Entry , 2007 / SIZE 6 acres / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Space Group

The landscape design for this project was an active ecological surface, filtering, cleaning, building and sustaining Talgar and the regional surrounds. Innovative development strategies add a layer of ecological infrastructure that enhance the diversity and richness of the site. The site operates as a responsive habitat, constantly evolving and changing according to the ecological processes and social usage patterns.

This fluid development strategy twines the landscape with development blurring the lines between both. Swaths of open space that protect sensitive natural features, steep slopes and wetlands, allow for fluid movement of both people and nature between site conditions. Considered insertions of residential and commercial development will advantage the spectacular setting and respect the existing terrain while maximizing site development potential. A unique system of physical and visual passages and linkages between the region and the people, the constructed and the natural, the ground and the sky, it allows for free movement from one realm to the other. With few barriers in Talgar, enhanced interactions will contribute to an environmentally responsible, adaptable and efficient development. This strategy will reach beyond the site as Talgar engages adjacent developments and landscapes.

Talgar was designed to be a Loop City with zero waste. In nature, all waste from one system becomes the food for another. Loop City emulates nature’s efficiency; independent but interconnected infrastructure systems help reuse waste and reduce pollution while taking care of essential development functions.

Samsung Learning Center

2007 - Seoul, Korea

Samsung Learning Center

Seoul, Korea

CLIENT Samsung Corporation / STATUS Completed 2007 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, NBBJ Architects

Balmori Associates’ landscape intervention for Samsung’s employee education center tower features multifunctional land burn containing programmatic elements that wraps around the site and its adjacent edges.  This landform is the organizing principle for the Samsung complex and interfaces with the building’s architecture.  The surfaces and materials of this three-dimensional landform create a multilayered interface and the opportunity for new types of spaces.  Alternating sheaves of landscape and architecture exist on both horizontal and vertical planes.

The linear landform flows from existing landmass of the site and its adjacent edges. It is the organizing principle by which a new learning center identity is patterned in the spirit of Samsung’s paradigm. Common materials are used in fresh combinations to create richly layered and textured surfaces and lines. These surfaces and lines are an effort to explore the interface of landscape and buildings. Reconfiguring the space in between and making new connections create more fluid passages- not blurring the line between landscape and architecture – but widening it. This thick interface creates the opportunity for new types of spaces. Thus, the widening of the line is to create transitions- alternating sheaves of landscape and building on horizontal and vertical planes. It is a complex interface that is layered – the thicker the line the better – and results in a new spatial entity.

Sound Waves

2013 - Bejing, China

Sound Waves

Bejing, China

CLIENT Beijing Garden Expo / STATUS Completed 2013 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates 

Sound Waves embodies the feelings triggered by viewing nature as depicted in Chinese landscape painting, reproducing the appearance of the magical Guilin’s mountains of the Li River. Bands of planting, like three-dimensional brushstrokes, play on the conventional reading of topographic contours, not connecting points of equal elevation, but instead mapping areas of similar conditions.

To capture over 140 different site conditions, Balmori constructed a parametric computational model of the garden that adapts to and aligns with transient information flows. Advanced programming methodologies allow the model to analyze year-round natural conditions of a particular area of the site, including sun hours per day, slope conditions, altitude, and wind exposure. The model performs by subdividing the site into a fine grid of points, which are then analyzed individually.

The experience is shaped by various paths that ascend and descend through the garden, hovering above and cutting through the site to offer perspectives to the hills and over the valleys. Balmori’s selection of plants builds upon the goals of the Expo with a focus on seasonal colors, textures, smells, and capacity to clean the city’s polluted air. 

Skid Rows I & II

2008 - New York, NY, USA

Skid Rows I & II

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Queens Museum of Art and Mildred's Lane / SIZE 2 acres / STATUS Skid Row 1 completed 2005, Skid Row II completed 2008 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Brian Tolle Studio 

Skid Rows I was a winning entry of the Artists Gardens competition and exhibition organized by the Queens Art Museum in 2005 as part of a large-scale survey of contemporary artist gardens, Down the Garden Path: The Artist’s Garden After Modernism. 

Skid Rows is both a garden and an artistic process. Diana Balmori and artist Brian Tolle careened around a grassy, two-acre expanse of the Queens Botanical Garden, doing doughnuts in a red Chevy pickup decorated with flower decals. With a custom-made trailer attached to the rear wheels, the truck inscribed circles in the earth while releasing yellow tickseed and red poppy seeds. This revolutionary method of low-impact cultivation called direct sowing challenges traditional planting techniques which tend to disturb the soil’s essential water and nutrient-retaining capabilities. Skid Rows is a hybrid performance and earthwork that created an unusual flower garden in the form of a two-acre drawing.

On May 24, 2008 Balmori Associates and Brian Tolle collaborated on Skid Rows II to celebrate the grand opening of Mildred’s Lane, an Artists’ Colony in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.  Transformed into a hybrid plow and seeder, the truck inscribed circles into the earth while simultaneously releasing sunflower and cosmos seeds. The ecology enabled the project to come up with new landscape forms.

Bronx Greenway

2004 - Bronx, NY, USA

Bronx Greenway

Bronx, NY, USA

CLIENT The South Bronx Green Roof Community Outreach Project  / STATUS Completed 2004 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Sustainable South Bronx, Columbia UniversitySchool of Public Health

The initiative is a collaboration among Sustainable South Bronx, the Columbia University Mallman School of Public Health, Cool City Project and Balmori Associates. Key goals are to create a network of living roofs in the South Bronx, monitor and document the benefits, and promote the use of living roofs throughout the South Bronx and the rest of the city.

The South Bronx is an ideal candidate for a network of living roofs. There is a dearth parkland and it has an extremely disproportionate amount of environmental burdens including than two dozen transfer stations, a sewage treatment plant and a sewage sludge pelletizing plan that plagues the area with odors and debris. Many of its citizens are especially vulnerable to the stresses of the urban heat island effect which can be severe in neighborhoods where the line population is elderly and lives in non-air conditioned apartments, surrounded by vast amounts of tree-less impervious surfaces.

In the urban context, the landscape is an active, living agent capable of changing local and regional conditions. A network of living roofs is a powerful new type of landscape which will play a significant role in reducing the city’s “heat island” effect: retaining and reusing storm run-off; and establishing many small, personally pleasurable oases in a landscape dominated by hot, tamed surfaces.      

Shanghai Cultural Plaza

2005- Shanghai, China

Shanghai Cultural Plaza

Shanghai, China

CLIENT City of Shanghai / STATUS Competition finalist, 2005 / SIZE 16 acres / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Beyer Blinder Belle

This park emerges as a continuous green gesture that unifies the diverse built elements of this urban site. The site is fragmented by remnants of various stages of urban development: historic residential buildings, a spaceframe canopy, an underground subway station, and a tree-lined street with bars and restaurants. These disparate pieces have been incorporated into a variety of park spaces through topography, planting and built elements.

A water garden surrounding the historic homes flows into the rest of the park as a series of water pools. A landform ramps below grade to extend the surface of the park to meet the underground subway exit.  A continuous balcony is built on the backside of existing bars and restaurants to open street life onto the park. New features such as a performing arts center and an amphitheater complete the transformation of this site and its diverse built elements into a dynamic cultural space.

 

Washington Mall

2012 - Washington, DC, USA

Washington Mall

Washington, DC, USA

CLIENT United States Washington Mall / STATUS Competition 2012 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Work AC, Jacbos, ARUP, Local Projects, Quinn Evans, CMS Fountain Consultant, AIK Yann Kersale, Sherwood Design Engineers, LERA, JVP Engineers, F2 Environmental Design, Alice Walters / PHOTOS Courtesy Work AC

Throughout Washington DC’s history, the National Mall has represented the heart of the city and, by extension, the nation. The Mall’s landscape is as diverse as its uses: hosting protests and celebrations, accommodating vast crowds and intimate moments and paying homage to the past and the future. Like the country it represents, the Mall reflects the difference, offering the hardiness of “landscape” as a counterpoint to the formal austerity of its buildings and monuments.

The Sylvan Way project is organized by a landform that flows east-west across the site, beginning with a new Oak Grove at the corner of 15th Street, which hosts an intimate Sylvan Theater for informal performances for up to 100 spectators. The landform continues and curves around to create the grass bowl for large spectacles, and bends back again to create the second grove, within which we have placed a “Sylvan Restaurant.” The line continues to create a playground within a small valley of ponds fed by a previously buried stream, and then carefully curls around the restored Survey Lodge to rise again in a gently angled lawn, which conceals a new maintenance shed. From this point, a new “cherry blossom” bridge leads to the Jefferson Memorial, bringing it and the MLK memorial closer to the Mall, extending the cherry walk and eliminating the confusing side trek which now requires three road crossings. This bridge touches down midway between streets in newly created wetlands, which help regulate water on the site.

The primary landscape element of our scheme is the Sylvan Bowl, a grand new public space for the  Mall where visitors can linger in the shade to see spectacles, picnic, or to attend an NPS presentation. The grassy space is strategically “sylvaned” with trees, creating a shaded lawn where people can picnic, and rest. For the first time, people will be able to look directly up at the Monument behind a performance and enjoy everything from an intimate concert to a major event attended comfortably by 3,000 or even 10,000.

The Sylvan Bowl’s stage is a stone circle 65 feet in diameter. Harkening back to the original 1916 Sylvan Theater, it includes a  curtain of mist for this stage. When nothing is being performed, this will act as a fountain and play area for children. The simple materials of the stone stage surrounded by a thin channel of water, become part of the Sylvan environment of trees and grass. Other performance spaces include a small wooden stage in the Oak Grove, where a group of up to 100 can gather under the trees; another small stage close to the Survey Lodge; finally a smaller one in a courtyard of the building.. 

The design plays a dual role in reviving the historical on the site, while introducing elements of the contemporary. For the historical, the Monument and Survey Lodges are restored and their interiors redesigned; the mist curtain and grassy slope refer back to the original Sylvan Theatre of 1916; and the emphasis on theater recalls the importance of theater in the lives of Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln. Our present and future is represented by our focus on sustainability and the creation of a closed loop of soil recreation, water reuse, planting, recycling, and food production on site. With this approach, we enter the arena of our own times.

The “Sylvan Restaurant” is set within a new grove of trees at the west edge of the grass to accommodate the different programs creating three interior courtyards. The roof is a publicly-accessible spiral that supports a bounteous herb and vegetable garden for the restaurant, further emphasizing the site’s “bridge to Jefferson” and recalling Monticello’s embrace of agricultural landscape as an element in a uniquely American take on classical architecture. Each level of the building is seamlessly connected both internally and externally, through the publicly-accessible courtyards and rooftop. Within every level, the building’s functions intertwine with each other to become something more: a cafeteria formed around an open kitchen; a bookstore that doubles as a ”cultural gateway” to everything artistic happening in DC and that backs up on a flexible space for lectures, readings, performances; a restaurant that steps up to better and better views of the mall and where park rangers can eat lunch with visitors.

The second level, accessible directly from the top of the slope or via the largest courtyard accommodates the bookstore, the flexible event space and the entrance to a smaller full-service restaurant. We imagine, together with Local Projects, the bookstore as a “cultural gateway” to DC, providing up-to-the-minute information via electronic graphics and kiosks on the cultural life of the city.

The Survey Lodge has been re-imagined as a place to rent wheelchairs, electric vehicles and recreational equipment. It has also been reconfigured to accommodate a vastly expanded number of bathrooms and is designed to provide a major rest-stop for tour buses and passers-by. This slope also provides gentle access to the new Cherry Blossom Bridge which leads from here across the wetlands to join the existing cherry walk and access the Jefferson and Martin Luther King memorials.

The Monument Lodge will continue to serve in its historic role as the ticketing location for the Washington Monument. By removing the bookstore to the new Sylvan Restaurant building, the bathrooms and indoor ticketing accommodation can both be expanded and improved.

Repsol - YPF Headquarters

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Repsol - YPF Headquarters

Buenos Aires, Argentina

CLIENT Repsol-YPF / SIZE 1 Acre / STATUS Completed 2008 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Pelli Clarke Pelli

Repsol-YPF is located in the up-and-coming district of Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires. The design originally called for a three-story parking garage at the intersection of Macacha Güemes and Juana Manso streets. Balmori Associates buried the parking underground and created a one acre public plaza on top of it.

Patterns and motifs throughout the plaza echo the Pampas’ cultural history of the site. The selection of native and naturalized plants recalls the adjacent ecological reserve’s flora. A pergola runs along the edge of the courtyard while water features and planting beds emerge through a blue recycled glass surface. The six-story winter garden on the 27th floor showcases Argentina’s most important native trees such as Jacaranda.  The design and lighting of the winter garden allow these trees to be seen throughout the city at night.

 

Building an Urban Living Room

2010 - New York, NY, USA

Building an Urban Living Room

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Meat Packing District Initiative / STATUS Design proposed 2010  / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Erik de Jong

The proposal for a temporary solution for the public space of Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District (MPD) used the city’s streets for pedestrian use in a way that is flexible, inexpensive and contextually appropriate. Under the request of the Meatpacking District Initiative, Balmori Associates was given the task to re-imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments and design a language of street furniture and planting that helped define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, we first had to ask, what should a public place be? We wanted to engage a wide audience in answering this question. We set up an online forum through live video and twitter and invited landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, with their 40 Dutch students to discuss urban public space in the American context. We extended the conversation to the neighborhood by participating in a street festival “Conflux City”, and we also made a video that could be shown in various online blogs. We turned this community engagement exercise into a preliminary design scheme where one simple and inexpensive piece of furniture with interchangeable components – a pole and hollow pole base, canopy and rubber mats – can perform the functions of planter, shading, space partition, seating, lighting…even a birdhouse. The flexibility of this solution allows for a variety of layout options, from grouped seating at right angles or in triangles, to a weekend market activities or event space.

Qing Huang Dao Park

2005 - Bejing, China

Qing Huang Dao Park

Bejing, China

CLIENT City of Qinghuandao / SIZE 98 acres / STATUS Competition Winner, 2005 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / MAD Architects Office

The entry for the Qinghuangdao Park invited competition consists of juxtaposed landscapes, extreme in their differences, some indigenous, some foreign.  Five ecological zones compose a landscape mosaic: tidal marsh, dune prairie meadow, red pine forest, oak woodland, and finally a purely urban landscape.  The landscapes have been jumbled and mixed to produce intense experiences.  Woven together by active recreational programming, a network of paths, and architecture, they appeal to a wide variety of senses—smell, sign, touch.

The entire seaside site reads as one landscape that reveals its richness within each mosaic. The division of the parcels and landscape mosaics may take many forms. The contrasts between program and landscape in each parcel enliven the mosaic and create unique public and private spaces such as a spa in the marsh and a camping in the dunes. The development parcels paired with landscape mosaics are an innovative model of ecological design and development.

 

BBVA Headquarters

Madrid, Spain

BBVA Headquarters

Madrid, Spain

CLIENT BBVA / STATUS Competition Finalist 2009 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Zaha Hadid Architects

Our team was one of the two finalist in a bid to design the new headquarters of the leading financial group in Spain. Working with Zaha Hadid Architects and the concept of speed, our landscape proposal emphasized the linearity and movement of the building design in a cohesive banding of planted and paved areas that fillet and constrict in reaction to the built environment.  The initial reasoning behind the concept of speed is consistent with BBVA’s goals of technology and progress.

Topographical shifts in the groundplane help to further define the different areas within the office park. As the linear bands peel away and bifurcate, exterior elements such as seating areas, tables, and enclosures are created as moments of rest within the matrix of speed that makes up the site.  

Bay of Pasaia Masterplan

2009 - Pasaia, Spain

Bay of Pasaia Masterplan

Pasaia, Spain

CLIENT Provincial Government of Gipuzkoa / SIZE 68 Ha / STATUS Competition Finalist, 2009 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / S333 / IKEI / Lantec

The Bay of Pasaia was once an attractive, natural estuary for the River Oiastzun but over time the waterfront areas have been transformed into large man-made sites for shipyards, warehouses and for the storage of materials and goods. Titled ‘Revealing the Water’, the masterplan is premised on breaking down this artificial land, returning the waterfront sites to their natural state. The masterplan is premised on five planning concepts:

(1) revealing the water and transforming the present sites to a hybrid state that allows for new development while improving drainage, water quality and biodiversity;

(2) making waterfront parks and open spaces, linked into a wider network of parks and routes around the bay, such as the Camino de Santiago;

(3) re-establishing connections to the surrounding context at different scales by road, rail and boat;

(4) strengthening the existing neighborhoods around the bay, reflected in their distinctly different identities, architectures, public spaces, streetscapes and relationships to the coastline;

(5) building on local know-how to establish an accompanying cultural renewal and branding the site’s future in a solid base of marine and energy technology, gastronomy and fashion through Paco Rabanne’s label.