2025 Fellows: Lauren Todd Stimson, FASLA, Boston Chapter

STIMSON, Cambridge, MA
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Lauren Stimson is immersed in and inspired by the rural, and this approach is evident throughout her projects. Her work expertly elevates natural systems, embracing wildness and restoring lost ecologies. Applied across landscape typologies, from established (garden, campus, cultural institution, city park) to new (green infrastructure land bridge), the projects that Lauren has led for STIMSON have garnered design awards at every level of recognition and improve both human lives and ecosystems. She is a landscape architect, artist, activist, firm leader, parent-intentionally intertwined roles of living, learning, and practice. This careful choreography of work and home culminated in the creation of Charbrook, a farm and landscape architecture studio physically residing within a teaching landscape. A recipient of the Rome Prize in 2023, Lauren's projects always begin with research, to uncover buried histories and the intangible layers of a landscape that have shaped it over time. At Northeast Harbor in Mount Desert Island, ME, Lauren faced a severely compromised site and shallow soils. Research prompted her to take the land back to previous moments in its environmental history: high meadows, alpine summit, shrubland, and low-lying bogs. At the University of Massachusetts, Lauren worked with the architect of the new Design Building at her Alma Mater to unite the building and site. With exposed timber frame building construction, regionally inspired gardens, and green infrastructure, the project establishes a new ecological and creative standard for design students and academia, both inside and outdoors. The Hardberger Park and Land Bridge in San Antonio, Texas, was conceived of as cultivated wild, taking cues from surrounding agrarian missions and natural environs. This 330-acre park contains an urban ecology center, outdoor classrooms, picnic areas, overlooks, dog parks, and over eight miles of trails.