Pioneer Information
Karr, a native of Rochelle, Illinois, entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1956 to study city planning, but soon changed his focus to landscape architecture. He received his B.F.A. in Landscape Architecture in 1960, and soon thereafter headed to the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student to study with landscape architects Ian McHarg and Karl Linn. In the spring of 1963 he joined the office of landscape architect Dan Kiley in Charlotte, Vermont.
Dan Kiley and the natural beauty of Vermont had a profound effect on Karr’s sense of aesthetics and his professional development. He was particularly influenced by Kiley’s approach to design. Karr, like Kiley, felt that architecture and landscape architecture were interconnected. He recognized that architects and landscape architects were both designers and manipulators of space and that the difference between them was primarily in the materials that each used to form and modify space.
He left the Kiley office in the spring of 1969 to start his own practice, Joe Karr and Associates, as a division of the Chicago architectural firm of Harry Weese & Associates. Karr’s office designed more than 700 landscapes for universities, colleges, corporations, hospitals, senior living communities, institutions, parks, cemeteries, industrial sites, residential complexes and single-family homes. Karr’s work has been published in numerous books and publications. He served on boards, including the American Society of Landscape Architects Accreditation Board, and was named a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1992. After 35 years of practice he closed his office in 2004 and continued working as a landscape architectural consultant through 2011, retiring in 2012.
