Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station and a park at a prominent edge of Shanghai. The project’s scheme integrates historic buildings, and provides an appropriate separation of public and performance spaces from private living and educational spaces as well as a functional and ceremonial arrival and drop-off area. At the large central plaza, a dramatic interactive fountain welcomes visitors and creates a sense of drama for public performances. The feature may be shut off to create outdoor space for larger public gatherings. The plaza provides access to the Center’s four new buildings, each with its own distinctive outdoor courtyard. Courtyards are carved into the landscape, with the new spaces offering a variety of experiences for learning and performance. In this new amenity for the public, curving bands of paving, along with rows of trees, hedges and promenades sweep through the landscape, where seating and water features welcome visitors from the surrounding city.
Work attributed to SWA/Balsley principal John Wong and his team with SWA Group.
Balsley Park
Located on Manhattan’s West Side, Balsley Park, formerly known as Sheffield Plaza, has been transformed from a barren, lifeless plaza into the community’s most cherished common ground.
Following public outcry and many failed attempts to redesign the plaza, Thomas Balsley Associates was hired to build community consensus around a new park-like image and ...
Ferry Point Waterfront Park
Since the closing of a city-owned landfill in 1963, the site’s transformation into Ferry Point Waterfront Park has been a long, complex process. The new Ferry Point Waterfront Park will be a long linear eastern ecological extension of the previously built and conventionally programmed western Ferry Point Park. Part of a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, this...
Intercontinental Hotel
Located in the center of the vibrant Times Square district, this new four-star hotel (one of only three in New York City) serves as the base for well-traveled tourists, businessmen and dignitaries from around the world. As a unique product of the hotel’s branding and place-making strategy, the client asked that the courtyard make a memorable first impression o...
San Jacinto Plaza
The redesign of San Jacinto Plaza, a historic gathering place in El Paso’s downtown business district provides a state-of-the-art urban open space, while protecting and celebrating the history and culture of the site. The project was the result of an intensive community process involving input from a wide range of constituents. Active programming, environmenta...