Diana Balmori has won the battle, but she’s not one to gloat. From her sunlight-filled studio on the 12^th floor of a 19^th century building in Soho, she merrily leads by example, designing flexible landscapes that accept both nature’s capriciousness and the constraints of their urban setting. Despite having worked for decades to persuade the field of architecture to see landscape design as an equal partner, she greets calmly the remark that Architectural Digest has listed her as one of the Innovators of the Year (2013). Also, announced in June, Balmori Associates is part of the OMA team that won the Rebuild by Design competition for redesigning Hoboken after Hurricane Sandy.

The recent acclaim doesn’t faze her. As she sits at her unpretentious blonde-wood desk, the arched window behind her framing the sharp edges of surrounding rooftops, Balmori insists the bigger issue for her remains that of maintaining a creative spirit. In the face of the AD news, she remarks, “I had a particularly intelligent and creative mother, who always said to me that if you can keep yourself alive creatively then nothing else matters.”

Her tranquility in the face of such recognition doesn’t mean the road she’s traveled has been smooth. She won’t give her birth date because “there is a big price to be paid in professional work both by being a woman and by being a certain age, so, tough, I’m not saying it.”

Nor is she willing to be categorized in other ways. “I’ve done many different things, I like doing very many different things.” She compares herself to the rivers she loves. “The real essence of our own lives is change, of plants’ life is change, of the planet’s life is change, and therefore, for me, . . . I need the room to change like the river does.”

Likewise, over the years, Balmori has been open to amending her thinking about her work, and has experienced joy in discovering new ways of seeing. “There have been so many surprises,” she says, “there are too many to list.” She had always thought, for example, that spoken language was utterly separate from the visual language of architectural drawing and landscape design. But through arguing with a landscape architect in Scotland who always included text in his landscapes, she changed her mind. “I kept going against him and saying these are two totally different things, why are you putting them together? And he said, ‘to me they’re absolutely the same.’ Then I realized . . . looking at it from his angle . . . that for me, too, there was this passage between one and the other.” She began to see that poetry, as a way of making images with words, is “just like the things that I’m doing, I’m creating images of things.”

This flexibility is deeply integrated within her work. “Sometimes you just start a piece of work and you hit a stone wall. You try to find ways around it and end up going in a totally different direction.” By adopting the methods that nature itself employs, and allowing for “change that is heterogeneous, composed of incredibly different elements,” she says, it becomes possible to “embed the city in nature, rather than plunking a bit of nature into the city.”

Balmori finds inspiration in the work of Virginia Woolf, helping her to keep the creative spirit alive, and particularly admires Woolf’s lyrical agility. “I would love to have that control of language,” she said, as she disappeared behind the large metal studio door. “There’s nobody better.”