Designing Woman

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Balmori rarely generates a vision and tries to subdue a landscape to match it; on the contrary, she feels that her work starts with an appreciation for what is already there naturally. She describes one project she envisioned for a suburb in Minnesota that had fallen on hard times and was having trouble attracting residents. After testing the soil around some abandoned houses, her team discovered that they were sitting on wet soil that had been layered on top of a waterway. It was no surprise that flooding was a recurring problem. Balmori's proposal entailed liberating that waterway -- showing it, rather than hiding it beneath layers of dirt -- and "using the subterranean geology to give shape to the city," as she puts it. Instead of fighting the water, the town would follow the natural order, bringing residents closer to the existing features of the landscape and providing a practical solution to the problem of flooding.

"Everybody says they want green cities, but nobody knows what that means," says Balmori. "It's not just a green roof. It's trying to put living elements in a city and to make the city part of the living equation of the earth, rather than considering it inert."

In the end, the town rejected Balmori's proposal. "It was too radical," she says, putting the word in quotation marks.

It's a critique Balmori has heard a lot over the course of her career, and it continues to frustrate her. How does she contend with the recurring ways in which reality bumps up against idealism, both artistic and environmental? "I cope with great difficulty," she says, "great difficulty. And that's all I can say."

It's one thing to be an artist creating visions of the future to be mounted in a museum; it's another to contend with the limitations of funding, imagination, practicalities, and political agendas. Balmori designed an elaborate plan for the city of St. Louis involving anchored floating islands that would rise and fall with the Mississippi River, bringing visitors into harmony with the natural rhythm of the water. The city eventually decided, after elaborate and costly studies, that the islands would be too fragile to withstand the considerable debris that floats down the Mississippi. And then a separate political issue -- whether or not to develop the grounds around the Gateway Arch -- turned the focus of funds and energy away from linking the river and the life of the city, Balmori's passion, and toward showcasing the arch itself.

One of Balmori's most ambitious projects, this time in Asia, has run into similar obstacles. It's her design for the Orwellian-sounding Public Administration Town (PAT), part of a new "multifunctional administrative city" that South Korea is planning to build between the capital, Seoul, and the coast. The images Balmori's firm has rendered show a vast park that curves its way in and around the city -- only this park floats high above ground level, on a series of connected rooftops. It's a sweeping vision of the future: in addition to stretching the imagination, it also forces the viewer to ask, why hasn't this existed before?

The current president of South Korea has little interest in moving the government to a new location, but the plan was put in place, and work was started, under his more popular predecessor. Balmori hopes that with the election of a new president in 2012, the project will resume.

"I'm tremendously excited about the big projects, but the time of implementation is colossal," she says. "You put the idea out and then you have to wait years to see the thing realized, so you move on to something else."

It is perhaps healthy, then, that Balmori takes equal delight in the small projects -- the roof garden at 240 Central Park South; a private home in Bedford, New York; even a piece of performance art. In 2005, she collaborated with the artist-activist Brian Tolle on skid/rows, a project commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art. This involved Balmori and Tolle driving a 1991 Chevy Silverado -- a pickup truck -- in random paths through Flushing Meadows Park, sowing seeds in the furrows the truck left behind, preparing the way for a trail of red poppies and yellow tickweed to blossom in the coming months. The objective: an entertaining demonstration of the direct-sowing technique of planting, which is healthier for the soil than plowing. The resulting improvised garden was visible to passengers on planes taking off and landing at LaGuardia Airport. For Balmori, even a small -- if splashy -- piece of performance art can yield big-picture results.

Although she has a strong academic background, her writing is imbued with more than a little art and poetry. "The truth is that all gardens are transitory -- more like our lives, less like architecture," she wrote in the introduction to Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives, a book by the photographer Margaret Morton that documents the gardens created by homeless people. "We build them to give an illusion of permanence. In this way, too, they resemble our lives. More than any other art, landscape is positioned in impermanence. This, in fact, is its strength, not its weakness."

Morton and Balmori have remained close since the book was published in 1995. "She's very edgy and takes chances that make people much younger than her feel conservative by comparison," says Morton. She recalls a design by César Pelli for the Owens Corning World Headquarters in Toledo, Ohio, that Balmori had proposed surrounding with a field of wheat. "It was pretty radical," Morton says, "but it made so much sense. What's more beautiful than a field of wheat?"

At the end of April, Balmori headed off once again to Bilbao, where workers would soon break ground on the park by the Nervión River, which won a global competition in 2004. Balmori has already had a major influence on the look of the city, working in collaboration with Pelli to open up to public use an area by the river that had historically been inaccessible to pedestrians. Where there was once an outdated port there is now a riverside promenade, bike paths, and -- essential to Balmori's vision of user-friendly nature -- three tram stops, linking Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum and the opera house. Small details speak to Balmori's commitment to incorporating the natural ecosystem: on some pathways, spaces between the paving stones allow water to infiltrate the soil and recharge the water table. Beneath the light tram that runs alongside the river is grass that thrives in Bilbao's misty environment and provides another semicontinuous line of green in the landscape.

Rivers, above all, animate Balmori's sense of possibility. She revels equally in the opportunity to rectify past engineering mistakes. Too often, she says, "the edges of rivers and cities have been engineered with stone walls." Balmori says stone walls with the same distaste that some might use for industrial waste. "That increases the speed of water and does away with all the vegetation along the bank. We're always trying to retain the curvature so it slows down the water and allows plants to grow, which produces less erosion. We're always trying to have some element that allows the river to function the way it's supposed to."

Balmori's approach to her work may be idealistic, but it is also highly practical. Rather than appealing to some prelapsarian idea of uninterrupted nature, she seeks to introduce landscapes that encourage the active engagement of urban dwellers with their natural surroundings. It's a blend of artifice and the natural, beautiful systems that treat people and the environment with equal respect. "It's the art that matters," Balmori writes in her introduction to a survey of her firm's work. "I am in it for the art."