Spending a couple of hours with Diana Balmori is like putting on a pair of future goggles. When you leave her office, you see the landscape differently. And not just because the High Line towers outside her door and illustrates her point about integrating green space in urban areas. You start to think how easy it would be to tuck some plants in the dirt here, drop some grass seed on a rooftop there. The cityscape could be so much more sustainable and so much less monotonous if we invited nature in rather than paved it out.
In 2009, Balmori’s designs for green rooftops and other ideas for sustainable landscapes earned her a spot on the Utne Reader’s list of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Next month Yale University Press is publishing her new book that’s part call to action and part meditation on how we live called, “A Landscape Manifesto.” She boils down her philosophy to 25 points. Topping her list is a statement that could easily apply to other facets of life: “Nostalgia for the past and utopian dreams for the future prevent us from looking at our present.”
Some of the more radical ideas that Balmori expresses also make a lot of sense. Like un-daming rivers and planting banks to accommodate a river’s ebb and flow. Incorporating waterways into cities rather than fencing them off. And creating more spaces like New York’s High Line that bridge the gap between cities and nature.
Architects and landscape designers have a reputation for amassing huge libraries (as shown by another Yale University Press book, Unpacking My Library.) The office of Balmori Associates is no exception. Balmori’s collection ranges from poetry to engineering. Her most prized book, a gift from her father, is a yellowed edition of Tacitus published in 1644.
We wondered if being a landscape designer naturally lends itself to the study of a broad range of subjects. This led to a discussion about the famous park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who pursued careers as a journalist, farmer and public speaker in addition to creating New York’s beloved Central Park.
“I think it is something that has to do with landscape,” she said, relating Olmsted’s pursuits to her own intellectual curiosity. ‘It unites a series of fields. I think it gains from a broader look, rather than a very narrow academic path.”
Guest Author: Robin Shulman Her book: Eat the City published by Crown Books. BIO Robin Shulman grew up in a farming town in the heart of tobacco country in Ontario, Canada, and several moves later, arrived in New York City at age 16. So she has a bit of farm and a lot of city [...]
In which the author explains how books about real life are better than fiction.
First editions from her grandmother feature prominently in Jennifer Gilmore’s library.
