“Harriett Wimmer and Joe Yamada – a Legacy in the Making”
October 20, 2012
Harriett Wimmer, Joe Yamada, and Pat Caughey are the eponyms of an architectural landscaping firm that has as its legacy the attractiveness of the CSU campus in San Marcos, Horton Plaza, the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Plaza La Jolla Village, San Marcos Town Center, the San Diego River wetlands, Seaport Village, SeaWorld, and much of the UCSD campus. Pat Caughey, the third member of the triumvirate, will reveal how the first two made this happen. A brief preview:
At age 51, Harriett Wimmer opened a landscape-design office and earned a reputation for her gardens of many shades of green accented with white blooms. She became a licensed landscape architect in 1954 and was inducted into the Fellows class of the American Society of Landscape Architects in ’76.
Joseph Yamada joined Mrs. Wimmer in 1954 with a degree in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley. Soon they became partners and the firm was renamed Wimmer Yamada. Mr. Yamada proceeded to generate award-winning landscape designs for the firm’s clients for over a half century.
The man who will give us some human-interest background on this, Pat Caughey, is the president of the firm today. He has served as national president of the American Society of Landscape Architects; as a board member of ACE, a nation-wide Architecture-Construction-Engineering mentoring program for high-school students, and of the San Diego Architectural Foundation; and as a member of the San Diego Urban Forestry Committee.
Come to the Friends of San Diego Architecture meeting in October to hear how an unlikely pair of landscape architects sowed the seeds of their firm’s success.
(John Mann)