Sylvester Baxter Lecture: Lauren Stimson and Stephen Stimson, "restraint + wildness"

What defines how we think about design? 1743. Microclimate. Stonewall. Cow lane. Bicentennial farm. Manure spreader. First cutting. Milk room. Harry Ferguson. Maple sugaring. Second cutting. Clover. Son. Milk room. Baby boomer. Mitsy. Holstein herd. Brothers. Splitting wood. Runnel. Line. Felcos. Hard. Apple tree. Dump truck. Lightening. Modernism. Ten generations. Baseball glove. Barn chores. Father. Mending fence. Rigor. Smell of freshly cut hay. Structure. Apple pie. Mashed potatoes. Silence is golden. Masculine. Quiet. One-word answer. Prismacolor. HB. Tom Petty. Terra firma. Physical. Farm dump. 5 am milking. Row of sugar maples. Hand drawing. Mylar. Rapidograph. Ink. Precision. Twenty-six-foot-long cross-section. Aries. Turkey dinner. Stoic. Wield a chainsaw. Yankee ingenuity. 1”=1’-0”. Vanilla. Blue eyes. Intuition. Dog-eared recipes. Cats. Grandma Louise. Mountain town. 1969. Immigrant. Iskwelahang Pilipino. Daughter. 1977. Gen Z. Hybrid vigor. Sgt. Pepper’s. Sister. Wood lot. Sassafrass. Marcescence. Ramps. Fiddleheads. Raspberry patch. Run-on sentences. Intangible. Postmodern. Soft. North slope. Lady slippers. Mood. 6B. Graphite. Conceptual. Scratch cooking. Charvin. Feminine. Catcher in the Rye. Singer sewing machine. Curve. Friend of the Devil. Garden slugs. 4-H. Jasmine rice. Scrounging. Washburn guitar. Tree house. Light touch. Trail runner. Emotion. Mother. Brown power. Lola. Chicken of the woods. Water lover. Trace. 7/8”. Unremitting zeal. Scorpio. Chicken adobo. Knit1 purl1. Homesteading. 2016. Baby girl. Sheep. Cows. Hedgerow. Kubota. Like a Wyeth. 2018. Copper. Mahal kita. Cereal bowls left on the table. Fieldwork. Maine, the way life should be. Buckwheat. Perpetually late. My paddle is clear and bright, flashing like silver. Spontaneous. Homemade lunches. Mud season. Experiment. White Park cattle. Wild gentian. Black raspberry with chocolate sprinkles, every single time. What defines how YOU think about design?

Speakers:

STIMSON is a collective of 40 designers led by partners Lauren and Stephen Stimson. With a shared love of design, crafts, plants, and landscape, the studio’s work is varied, including public parks, museums, college and school campuses, farms, and gardens. Stephen Stimson founded STIMSON in 1992 and has been practicing landscape architecture for 35 years, after growing up on a dairy farm and studying landscape architecture at UMass Amherst and Harvard. Lauren Stimson’s interest in art, landscape, geology, and history was nurtured at Bates College in Maine, and she earned a dual degree in landscape and planning from UMass Amherst. She joined the studio in 2006, and the pair have been working alongside each other ever since. Raised just two towns apart in New England, they returned to central Massachusetts fifteen years ago to homestead and begin a more remote branch of their practice. Charbrook, a lifelong project that connects designers to the land, serves as their home, studio, working farm, plant nursery, and site of experimentation and open-minded inquiry. STIMSON earned the ASLA’s Firm Award in 2021. Both Stephen and Lauren are ASLA Fellows. Lauren was awarded the 2023–24 Rome Prize, and they spent a year at the American Academy in Rome with their children.

00:00 Welcome by Sarah Rafson
02:24 Introduction by Gary Hilderbrand
10:29 Lecture by Lauren Stimson and Stephen Stimson
01:06:35 Discussion and Q+A