SWA/BALSLEY and WEISS/MANFREDI

About Thomas Balsley, FASLA and SWA/BALSLEY
Recipient of the prestigious ASLA Design Medal in 2015, Tom Balsley is a landscape architect whose visionary work focuses on the margins of the city—from the industrial edges of derelict railyards or neglected waterfronts to the discrete scraps of land overlooked in the urban grid. Regardless of the scale, his design is imaginative and transformative, resulting in vital, dynamic places that integrate nature, teem with public life and inspire civic pride.

His firm, Thomas Balsley Associates, became SWA/BALSLEY in 2017. Its work has long been at the forefront of innovative design responses to the complex issues related to sustainability, urbanism, resiliency and urban open space design. An embrace of the public process, coupled with a deeply held belief that collaborative processes elevate rather than inhibit the quality of design, are the foundations on which the firm’s designs are created and enjoyed. SWA/BALSLEY’s diverse portfolio features award-winning urban parks, waterfronts, plazas and streetscapes, as well as cultural, residential, commercial and institutional landscapes of all scales.

Highly acclaimed projects in New York City include Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park and Gantry Plaza State Park, Riverside Park South, Peggy Rockefeller Plaza, and Balsley Park, the latter named after him by the City in recognition of his longstanding contributions to its public realm. His urban parks also include Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Park, Baltimore’s West Shore Park, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower Park, Osaka’s World Trade Centers, among many others. Balsley’s work has been documented in two monographs, Thomas Balsley: The Urban Landscape (2001) and Thomas Balsley: Uncommon Ground (2015), available at MOMA’s bookstore.

About WEISS/MANFREDI
WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, recipients of the 2018 National Design Award for Architecture by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, is a New York-based multidisciplinary design practice known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design. WEISS/MANFREDI’s designs are marked by clarity of vision, bold forms, and material innovations. Around the world and across typologies, the firm’s work addresses pressing environmental and social challenges and asserts the importance of design in the public realm.

Projects including Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, the Women’s Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, the Diana Center at Barnard College, and Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park create new natural connections with the built environment. The firm’s current work includes U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, the Robert W. Wilson Overlook at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Artis—Naples Master Plan for the Kimberly K. Querrey and Louis A. Simpson Cultural Campus, Tulane University Commons, and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. This May, WEISS/MANFREDI debuted Lines of Movement, a new installation in the main exhibition of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, FREESPACE.

WEISS/MANFREDI was named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York, and additional honors include the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal of Honor, and the New York AIA Gold Medal of Honor. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Building Museum, the Essen Design Centre in Germany, the Louvre Museum, and the Venice Biennale.