Parrish Welcomes Landscape Architect Joe Wahler For Landscape Pleasures Symposium

The Parrish Art Museum will welcome landscape architect Joe Wahler, a principal at Massachusetts landscape architecture studio Stimson, on Saturday, June 11, to speak during Landscape Pleasures, the museum’s annual weekend of horticultural events.

Landscape Pleasures includes a Friday evening film screening and a Saturday morning symposium at the museum in Water Mill, a Saturday evening cocktail party at a Bridgehampton residence and Sunday garden tours at private homes in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack. Wahler will be one of three symposium speakers, each addressing landscape design of today.

Wahler’s presentation, “Relationships in Making Gardens for Our Time,” will share Stimson’s work on Flume Fountain at Heritage Museums & Gardens in his hometown of Sandwich, Massachusetts. The 208-foot-long flume pours water from a height of 26 feet into a pool full of waterlilies. The project earned Stimson a Boston Society of Landscape Architects’ 2014 Honor Award and the American Society of Landscape Architects’ 2019 Award of Excellence.

Founded three decades ago, Stimson was originally located on Cape Cod and does most of its work in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region but has extended its reach to residential, park and institutional projects as far afield as Texas, the Midwest and Canada.

Wahler, who joined Stimson in 2005, grew up on a golf course in northern Illinois, where his father, Randy Wahler, was the course superintendent. “I started visiting probably before I could walk, but I started working on my father’s crew when I was 7 and did that all the way through my undergraduate,” he said.

He interned for some of the leading superintendents in Illinois, Ohio and California, and in college worked on research for horticultural professors. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois in horticulture and a master’s in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University.

Wahler first landed in Massachusetts when he had an opportunity to work for national landscape architecture, civil engineering and planning firm Sasaki Associates in Watertown. There, his mentor Carol Moyles, a renowned landscape designer, advised him to keep an eye out for an opportunity to work with Stephen Stimson on Cape Cod. That opportunity came, and Wahler and his wife, fellow landscape architect Bernice Wahler, moved to the cape to join Stimson.

“I’ve always appreciated that each of our projects uniquely responds to client’s site aspirations for the project, and there’s a real attention to marrying the ideas with the place and then thinking about how materials are applied to achieve the design intent,” Wahler said of working at Stimson. “We’ve always been really focused on the detailed design in the materiality of landscapes and how those relate to historical influences — how materials have been used historically and how we can reinterpret and advance those ideas. And so all of these aspects of these well-rooted designs and the commitment to kind of overseeing and building work with our partners was something that was really attractive to me.”

Flume Fountain was a particularly memorable challenge for Wahler. He said it was a limited budget but a great opportunity and an enjoyable and rewarding project.

“The project brief was ‘create a feature that greets guests to the museum upon arrival’ but also activates this adjacent garden that they had,” Wahler said. “And so we developed this fountain concept that was pretty innovative, tied — similar to our other projects — to the cultural history and mission of the institution.”

The concept was based on flumes that took water from rivers to grist mills and took into consideration the huge grade change from the museum to the garden. “We were thinking about how could we create this really interesting feature that sliced through this forest that had a minimal impact on the existing trees,” Wahler recalled.

Stimson’s portfolio also includes a number of projects at Ivy League universities, including Harvard’s Paulson School of Engineering, the Brown University Performing Arts Center, and Cornell’s Multidisciplinary Building.

Regarding his presentation’s notion of “gardens for our time,” Wahler explained: “There are a lot of words that get thrown around about different design periods and design approaches. We don’t really subscribe to a design philosophy, but we are always trying to interpret what we know about the world today and to reflect that in the work that we’re doing currently. And I think as a firm, we are always learning and always improving and trying to take past lessons and bring them forward. So a landscape for our time is informed by all of the current thinking.”

Sustainability is key, he said, though he noted Stimson does not subscribe to the notion that “all native is always appropriate.”

Exclusively using native plants in landscape design is a sustainability method that is growing in popularity in light of biodiversity loss and climate change, but Wahler pointed out that for certain projects natives aren’t the best choice. There are brownfields and post-industrial sites with degraded landscapes that native plants are never coming back to, he said.

“We are open to what we call an ‘adapted plant community,’ where we’re open to embracing any plant that can thrive in such a degraded landscape,” he said, giving as an example a community park in Lawrence, Massachusetts. “We kind of created what we would call an ‘urban wild,’ embracing these adapted plants and some that are considered invasive plants, but they’re thriving, they’re doing work, they’re sequestering carbon. So we’re always thinking about what is the right approach, and I think that’s what our time is. We’ve got to adapt to what we’re faced with today and the history of the places that we’re working.”

Wahler said his big interest in landscape architecture is building collaboration in projects, not only in the design aspects but also in post-completion and management.

“We say that landscapes get better after they’re completed” and evolve an extra dimension as they mature, he said. “That’s something that I’m hoping to convey during our presentation at Landscape Pleasures.”

His fellow presenters are Laurie Olin, delivering “Steering from Pole to Pole: Forces at Play in Making Contemporary Landscape,” and David Hocker, with “Capturing the Spirit of the Modern Garden.”

“Landscape Pleasures is one of the premier events of bringing thought leaders together from landscape and planting design and art in architecture,” Wahler said.

He called Olin “one of the deans of landscape architecture,” a leader of the entire profession and a cherished member of the community. Of Hocker, Wahler said “his work is fantastic. … We’re great admirers of his work.”

Admission to Landscape Pleasures starts at $200 for Parrish members and $250 for nonmembers. At the sponsor level of $600 and above, ticket holders will be admitted to the cocktail reception in addition to the symposium and garden tours. For more information, go to parrishart.org.