Thomas Balsley

Thomas Balsley is the lead designer of Thomas Balsley Associates, a NYC-based urban landscape architecture firm whose work has had a profound impact on the built environment and the quality of life in cities across the US. His unique fusion of creativity and innovation with public process has produced extraordinary spaces large and small, provocative and sublime. His firm’s portfolio of award-winning projects and competitions include Dallas’ Main Street Garden, Cleveland’s Perk Park, Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Park, Tokyo’s Gate City, and Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. Closer to home, his highly acclaimed parks such as Riverside Park South, Gantry Park, Hunter’s Point South, and Peggy Rockefeller Plaza have helped to reshape NYC’s public realm. In an unprecedented acknowledgement of his contribution to public space in the City of New York, a park on 57th Street was renamed in his honor as Balsley Park. His teaching and speaking engagements at Harvard’s GSD, University of Pennsylvania, the National Building Museum, Seoul National University, etc., together with a wealth of publications and TV appearances, such as BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Gardens”, have exposed his work to a broader international audience. In the Spacemaker Press monograph “Thomas Balsley: The Urban Landscape”, NYT architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote: “Balsley inscribes places with a dual portrait of nature and culture in modern dress.”