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.

240 Central Park South

2008 - New York, NY, USA

240 Central Park South

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Douglas Lister Architect / SIZE 13,000 sf / STATUS Completed 2008 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates

The green roofs and entry courtyard of 240 Central Park South pull the character of Central Park through the building and up to the roof. Contoured ribbons of shrubs and sedums are interwoven with lines of slate, mimicking the rock outcroppings in the park. 

This landscape is designed to be experienced from multiple viewpoints. Visitors walking by the building catch glimpses of the cherry trees peaking over the parapet wall, while tenets inside the building are surrounded by the rolling ribbons of plants.  From the neighboring buildings and apartments above, the multiple levels of rooftops appear to join together into one unified landscape.

Metis Garden Festival

2011 - Grand-Métis, Quebec, Canada

Metis Garden Festival

Grand-Métis, Quebec, Canada

CLIENT Metis International Garden Festival, Reford Gardens / SIZE 150 m2 / STATUS Completed, 2011 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates / Consulmar S.R.L / Denis Pelli, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University

Water introduces a powerful horizontal allowing the eye to extend far over its flat surface and wide along the horizon, producing a particularly pleasurable experience which becomes an inseparable part of the landscape experience. We researched devices that manipulate the way one apprehends space and make the viewer more conscious of the act of seeing. The viewing device chosen for this demonstration is a tube or truncated cone (with both ends cut off). The cone restricting the visual field is implemented as a series of planes with a circular opening, the void gradually rising from the ground. When progressing through the frames towards the water focusing on the floating element the field of view opens itself, the horizon gets wider and infinite space offers itself to the viewer.

Bartscherer Garden

New York, NY, USA

Bartscherer Garden

New York, NY, USA

STATUS Under Design / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates

The townhouse garden extends the living and dining space of the kitchen into the landscape.  An elegant gravel platform floats in the center of the small garden.  Shifting the platform geometry maximizes the planting and gives movement to the garden.  A steel cabled trellis system anchors the garden, providing privacy and sculptural edges.  Vines climb the trellis, while tall perennials pierce through the openings to create an unexpected seasonal variation of color in several dimensions. 

The plantings follow a gradient of color, choreographed through all the seasons.  One may dine on the deck, entertain on the platform or sit alone amongst the plants in the back corner of the garden, experiencing the garden in various ways.  Pockets of plantings emerge from the garden screens for herbs and seasonal flowers.

Wuhan Garden Expo

2015 - Wuhan, China

Making Horizon 地平線 - 水平線

Wuhan, China 

Creative Garden Design Scheme for the 10th China (Hubei) International Garden Expo

The horizon line is one crucial reference when experiencing landscape.  It is the apparent line that separates earth and sky.  An ocean introduces a powerful horizontal allowing the eye to extend far over its flat surface and wide along the horizon, producing a particularly pleasurable experience which becomes an inseparable part of the landscape experience. Sometime the “true horizon” is obstructed by objects such as trees, buildings, mountains – this would be called the “visible horizon”. In cities with multiple, stacked, and constricted horizons, the search for the sense of an open horizon gets partly satisfied in the opening a park provides. Perhaps then, real pleasure from being in a park depends not only on the presence of vegetation, but on the release from the city’s constriction of the horizon line. One of the tasks of landscape may then be to create the sense of a wide horizon.

Since 2006 Balmori Associates, Landscape and Urban Design has been divided in two parts.  The first is a landscape practice that investigates landscape as a constructed space. The second part, BAL/LAB, is a collection of research and experiments. One BAL/LAB deals with the challenges of representing landscape. Diana Balmori wrote in Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Wiley, 2014) that “Landscape architecture is an art of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is essential for understanding and appreciating landscape; central vision alone cannot capture it.” To explore this, vision scientist Denis Pelli and Balmori Associates’ staff set up an experiment to measure how restricting the observer’s field of view affects the observer’s experience of the beauty of a landscape. The viewing devices chosen for this demonstration are a tube and truncated cone (with both ends cut off).  The results show that restricting the observer peripheral vision reduced the viewing pleasure.

In 2011 for a Garden Festival in Metis, Canada, Balmori Associates implemented the viewing cone described above as a series of planes with a circular opening, the void gradually rising from the ground. When progressing through the frames towards the St Lawrence River, focusing on the floating islands, the field of view opens, the horizon gets wider and infinite space offers itself to the viewer.

The Meditation Room BAL/LAB launched in 2014 emerges from the exploration of the ideas of horizon and peripheral vision. The research aims at creating the sense of an expansive horizon in the smallest of spaces. In May 2015 Balmori Associates built an installation presented by The Drawing Center during the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival in New York City. “Meditation Room: Horizon” is formed by a continuous wall of paper where the overlapping of two dot matrix systems come together to create a visible horizon. Visitors were invited inside to meditate for ten minutes. The design of Making Horizon地平線 - 水平線 for the 10th China (Wuhan) International Garden Expo is the result of our research and investigation of landscape representation and peripheral vision.

The project name 地平線 - 水平線 was inspired by two very distinctive spatial environments created in the garden.  The first being the constricted and constantly shifting horizon of the bamboo forest, with the very bold horizon line painted across the bamboo canes.  This we would refer to as 地平線 a general term to describe the boundary between earth and sky.

Once in the interior space, you are greeted by an illusion of an open and infinite horizon, created with the use of curved mirrored walls that reflect the sky, and the pool of water on the ground. This we would refer to as 水平線, a term used to describe the more specific horizon line made by the meeting of sky and water.

Making Horizons (地平線 - 水平線) creates a powerful twofold experience that challenges the perception of space.

 The visitor is initially drawn into the garden by following a spiraling path of blue pebbles, these pebbles have glow-in-the-dark properties. During the day the pebbles absorb sunlight, and in the evening light is given off by them. This soft blue light illuminates the path, creating a mysterious glowing path which guides the visitor through the bamboo forest.

In this space, the visible horizon line - where the earth’s surface and the sky appear to meet - shifts to a constructed horizon line, defined by the meeting point of two colors, blue and yellow, which is painted on the vertical bamboo stalks. Yellow at the top and blue at the base. This line creates a very distinctive and powerful visual horizon, which is in contrast to the verticality of the bamboo itself. The forest of bamboo creates an intense and constricted space, and chops up sightlines creating a maze-like experience.

As visitors follow the blue pebble path they circle towards the center of the garden, the bamboo forest progressively intensifies as the stalks become closer together and as the pebble path narrows. The sense of compression becomes magnified towards the center of the garden revealing a previously invisible space. A continuous circular mirrored room reflects and extends outside the dense vertical space of the surrounding bamboo. But from the inside it shifts to an open horizontal plane, with continuous mirrors on each side and a thin and still layer of water on the ground. The water reflects the sky above, extending the open space to infinity; it is a space of meditation at the core of the garden.

The visitor will be able to enter this room and walk out into the center; a narrow gravel path of gravel submerged just under the skin of the water will give the illusion of walking on water whilst creating a continuous water plane.  The illusion of the endless reflection of water introduces a powerful horizontal allowing the eye to extend far over its flat surface, producing a pleasurable landscape experience.

Where the surrounding bamboo forest creates a constricted   environment, the center creates an ephemeral one, where the visual clarity of the horizon line will stand in contrast to the changing mood of the sky. 

Ground Zero Viewing Wall

2003 - New York, NY, USA

Ground Zero Viewing Wall

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT LMDC / STATUS Completed 2003 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates, Pelli Clarke Pelli 

Temporary memorials arose as a way for both city residents and visitors to respond immediately to the events of September 11th --areas for grieving sprang up on fences, traffic islands in downtown Manhattan and fire stations throughout the city. While the pairing of the terms ‘temporary’ and ‘memorial’ is seemingly contradictory, this juxtaposition adds a certain resolution that exists for a fixed period in time. Balmori Associate’s viewing wall for Ground Zero looks to those spontaneous, short-lived responses as a way to capture a specific moment of our grief.

Ground Zero’s perimeter enclosure was imminent, as the Port Authority announced plans for a 40-foot long fence around the site; as a response, Balmori Associates generated ideas for the enclosure, presenting them in model form at a meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects at the Max Protetch gallery.

The proposal was sent to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) and the Port Authority developed an alternate plan based on Balmori Associates’ design.  New York New Visions, a committee of design professionals concerned with the rebuilding effort, further revised the proposal during a weekend charrette. The Port Authority then produced construction documents, modifying our suggestions but keeping our original idea of transparency and setbacks.  The final viewing wall was 13 feet high with 5-foot setbacks where visitors were able to leave mementos to be collected on a regular basis.

The structure is also a sort of construction fence-a regular feature at every construction site in the city since John D. Rockefeller put one specifically designed for viewing the construction of Rockefeller Center in the 1930s- an acknowledgement of the public’s legitimate inclusion in urban development. 

The name of the structure changed from “construction fence” to “perimeter enclosure” and then to “viewing wall” to reflect an awareness of its public role.

West Village Townhouse

2003 - New York, NY, USA

West Village Townhouse

New York, NY, USA

STATUS Completed 2003 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates 

The idea for this west village townhouse was to create layers of landscape on multiple surfaces, both horizontal and vertical.  The architecture steps down in the back to allow maximum levels of sunlight into the house, allowing for terraced gardens at each level.  The top garden is a private garden off of the master bathroom, which floats in a field of grasses.  The middle terrace is an entertainment garden with a screen of bamboo and a wood platform event space.  Spilling from the kitchen, the first level terrace has a grand ‘moss painting’ of granite and moss, and is stitched together by an indoor/outdoor koi pond for all seasons.  The facade is wrapped in planting, using a screen of plantings to create a bold play of the interface between architecture and landscape. 

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.