Diana Balmori. Photo copyright Margaret Morton, 2009.
BY JANE MARGOLIES
 
Diana Balmori, FASLA, a pioneering member of the profession and founding partner of Balmori Associates, a landscape and urban design firm based in New York, died November 14 at her home in Manhattan at the age of 84. The cause of death was lung cancer.
During a career that encompassed wide-ranging projects?including the Winter Garden, with its grove of palm trees, inside the World Financial Center in New York and the transformation of the formerly industrial port area of Bilbao, Spain, into an expansive public park?Balmori championed the integration of landscape and architecture. She rejected the notion that landscape design was the mere ?shrubbing up? of buildings, as she put it, after they were erected. In her firm?s innovative master plan for South Korea?s new administrative capital, Sejong City, the landscape comes first: a rolling, elevated green space that connects and shapes the government buildings below. An early advocate of sustainable landscape practices, she challenged the iconic suburban lawn?with its intensive use of water, fertilizers, and gasoline for mowing?in the seminal book Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony, published in 1993. More recently, she advanced landscapes as protection against the effects of climate change.
Balmori found expression for her varied interests?which included all forms of art?at the firm she founded in 1990. She realized th...