Thomas Balsley Associates

Thomas Balsley Associates is a New York City-based, award-winning design firm that specializes in urban landscape architecture in the public realm. In New York City and throughout the United States, the firm’s diverse portfolio includes compelling parks, plazas, waterfronts, and private landscapes that teem with life and spark the public’s imagination.

Thomas Balsley Associates’ broad and balanced portfolio is respected by both the public and private sectors for its design sensitivity and responsiveness to the realities of the public review process, multiple client interests, budgets, schedules, and the challenges of sustained success. Since 1980, the team at Thomas Balsley Associates has worked with virtually every public agency in New York City and many throughout New York State. The firm has built a reputation for creating unique civic spaces that enrich the lives of the communities and individuals who inhabit them. Extensive experience with the intricacies of the design review process ensures that concepts and master plans become completed landscapes.

Among the firm’s most recent public commissions are: Candlestick Point / Hunters Shipyard in San Francisco; Inner Harbor Parks in Baltimore; Skyline Park in Denver; South Waterfront Greenway in Portland; Main Street Garden Park in Dallas; Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park in Tampa; Gate City in Tokyo; Magok Waterfront in Seoul; Hunters Point South in Long Island City; Ferry Point Waterfront Park in the Bronx and Soundiview Park in the Bronx.

In New York City alone, Thomas Balsley Associates has designed more than 100 public spaces including awarding winning projects such as Capitol Plaza, Riverside Park South, Chelsea Waterside Park, Peggy Rockefeller Plaza and Gantry Plaza State Park. In an unexpected gesture of recognition for Mr. Balsley’s contribution to New York City’s public realm, a park he designed on 57th Street was renamed Balsley Park.

Every year brings international recognition in the form of awards and citations from professional and civic organizations, including the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the American Institute of Architects, Environmental Design Research Association, the Institute for Urban Design and the Waterfront Center.

Thomas Balsley Associates’ work has appeared in national and international publications and media including the recent BBC documentary “Around the World in 80 Gardens,” ELA of Korea, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, Sculpture Magazine, Abitare, Arredo Urbano, Progressive Architecture, L’Arca, Arredo Urbano, Ville Giardini, International Design, ULI Urban Land, Places, Chinese Architect, and Japan Landscape.Spacemaker Press devoted a monograph to Thomas Balsley’s work, entitled “Thomas Balsley: The Urban Landscape.”