Since its founding in the early 1900s, Burlingame lacked a signature downtown open space. In 2009, the mayor and council kicked off an initiative to make downtown more pedestrian-friendly, including enhancing the Burlingame Avenue retail main street. The capstone of that initiative is the transformation of a one-acre parking lot between Park Road and Lorton Avenue into an outdoor living room—opening in 2026 as Burlingame Town Square.
Organized into two distinct zones, the Town Square is overlaid with a grid of deciduous trees, seating clusters, and large custom wood slat benches along the sunny northwest edge. The Park Road half of the Square includes flexible space and a small performance area to host markets and festivals, while the Lorton Avenue half features communal tables and outdoor games. Flanking curbs are designated for drop-off, supporting the Square as a natural meeting and socializing spot downtown.
Midway through the Square, a water feature clad with angled panels of cast dichroic glass shifts from icy white to aqua, gold, and royal blue depending on sun angle and viewing position, screening a public restroom. Throughout, the design features a warm modern design vocabulary with a palette of oranges, reds, and rusts recalling the brick façades and outdoor dining along Burlingame Avenue. After dark, theater-grade projectors wash the Square’s main walk with a shimmering light artwork evoking Burlingame Creek, now culverted below ground.
Through a partnership between the City and developer of 220 Park, an adjacent six-story office building with ground-level retail and an adaptive reuse of a 1941 Art Deco post office, the Square extends beyond the City’s parcel into this development with additional paving, seating terraces, and an elevated dining area and restaurant. Over time, other surrounding buildings are anticipated to open up to the Square, completing its function as a defining civic gathering space for Burlingame.
Gantry Plaza State Park
Once a working waterfront teeming with barges, tugboats, and rail cars, the Hunter’s Point shoreline slowly succumbed to the realities of the Post-Industrial Age and this spectacular site was left to deteriorate. Thomas Balsley Associates, together with Weintraub di Domenico, envisioned Gantry Plaza State Park as a place that celebrates its past, future, skyli...
The Memorial at Harvey Milk Plaza
Harvey Milk Plaza is located in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro Neighborhood, and hosts one of the city’s busiest transit hubs. The plaza has been the site of countless gatherings and protests, including a candlelight vigil the night of Harvey’s untimely death and the White Night riots, which were sparked by the leniency of the sentence handed down to his ...
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
In the early 1970s, the National Park Service began the enormous task of creating a new national recreation area in the midst of an urban center—the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 4.5 million people at the time. Riding the wake of the environmental revolution of the late 1960s, the Park Service would need to find consensus among a wide range of constituents, ...
Resonant Memory: One October Memorial
Inspired by the shared love of country music that brought people from all over the world together for the Route 91 Music Festival, Resonant Memory is based on the shape of an acoustic guitar. The design makes particular use of the instrument’s sound hole as a recurring motif to represent absence, honoring the lives lost on October 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada...