Diana Balmori was born in Gijón, Spain on June 4, 1932. She studied architecture at the National University of Tucumán in Argentina, but failed to receive a degree when the government expelled her entire class because of a student protest. She emigrated to the United States in 1952 with her husband. She received a doctorate in urban history at U.C.L.A. in 1973.
In 1980, she joined her husband's firm, César Pelli and Associates, where she created a department of landscape architecture and worked with him on several projects including the Winter Garden Atrium in the World Financial Center in Manhattan. She was a landscape architect whose ecologically sensitive designs integrated buildings and the natural environment. In 1990, she founded Balmori Associates. The firm worked on numerous projects including transforming the old industrial port of Bilbao, Spain, into a park system; the Gwynns Falls Trail in Baltimore; a trail system in Cedar Lake Park in Minneapolis; and South Korea's new administrative capital, Sejong City.
Her first book, Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes, written with Diane Kostial McGuire and Eleanor McPeck, was published in 1985. Her other books include Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony written with F. Herbert Bormann and Gordon T. Geballe, Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture written with Joel Sanders, and A Landscape Manifesto. She died from lung cancer on November 14, 2016 at the age of 84.
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