Last September, Stimson invited its entire crew to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, for a retreat. Do not picture the trust exercises and intense work sessions of a corporate team-building effort. Everybody just went into the studios to throw pots, carve spoons, or forge knives and hung out enjoying the magnificent oceanfront setting and the inspiring campus, a modernist icon designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Stimson had recently been invited, along with Simons Architects, onto the team that’s drawing up a new master plan for Haystack. But the week there was not focused on any landscape architecture outcome. It was instead a chance to be together after many months of remote work, finally meet recent hires in person, and try to get the hang of a few unfamiliar artisanal skills. “That takes us out of our comfort zone and loosens us up to take some of those broad principles of the crafts back,” the studio director Laura Gomez observed at the time, “not even specifically applying to craft—but to ways of thinking about how we iterate things.”
