Thomas Balsley

For more than 40 years, Tom’s commitment to innovative design has connected people with place, each other, and to the current culture of recreation, urbanism, and sustainability. Working in the margins of the post-industrial city, his work has a pioneering and exploratory quality, pushing the limits of design within the mainstream psyche. These are transformative and provocative urban landscapes of social, cultural, and environmental significance to the resilient and livable city vision. In the arena of the city, he has faced the dilemmas of craft and art, public service, and self-expression that have shaped the profession over the past four decades. In the course of designing scores of urban parks and waterfronts, he has forged a design philosophy firmly grounded in the dual goals of addressing social, cultural, and environmental equity, while expanding the public’s landscape imagination.

His firm’s diverse portfolio includes more than 100 public and private landscapes throughout NYC, including Peggy Rockefeller Plaza, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, exhibited at MoMA, Riverside Park South, and Gantry Plaza Park. In a rare gesture of recognition of his contribution to New York City’s public realm, a park he designed on 57th Street was named Balsley Park.

His broader impact on the public realm throughout the U.S. and abroad can be seen in iconic downtown spaces, such as Dallas’s Main Street Garden Park, Cleveland’s Perk Park, Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Park, Baltimore’s West Shore Park, Denver’s Skyline Park, Seoul’s Digital City Central Park, Shanghai’s Harbor City Parks, Tokyo’s Gate City, Moscow’s Paveletskaya Place, Toronto’s Aitken Place Park, Sao Paulo’s B32 Plaza, and Rotterdam’s Nelson Mandela Park. Many of these spaces are the product of “public private partnerships” that focus both on shared investment benefits including social, cultural, and environmental resilience.

Mr. Balsley has participated as a panelist and lecturer for the Municipal Art Society, Institute for Urban Design, International Downtown Association, ULI, AIA and ASLA. He has taught and lectured at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, CUNY, the University of Pennsylvania, and Seoul University. He is the recipient of the coveted ASLA-NY’s prestigious President’s Award, as well as the National ASLA Design Medal, which recognizes a career of design excellence.

Two monographs of his work have been published: “Thomas Balsley: The Urban Landscape,” published by Peter Walker’s Spacemaker Press, with a forward by NYTimes Architecture Critic Herbert Muschamp; and “Thomas Balsley: Uncommon Ground,” published by ORO, with a forward by James Corner of Field Operations, and found at MoMA bookstore. Both monographs offer a glimpse into his unconventional, idiosyncratic, and passionate design approach, which has made him, as Peter Walker states, “a spokesman for open space, the designed public realm, and landscape architecture.”