Thomas Church (landscape architect)

Thomas Dolliver Church (April 27, 1902 – August 30, 1978), also known by Tommy, was a renowned and innovative 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.

Thomas Church was born in Boston, and raised in California, in Ojai and Oakland.

He received his B.A. degree in Landscape Architecture from the College of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1922. He then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received his Master’s degree in City Planning and Landscape Architecture in 1926.

After graduating Church spent six months at the American Academy in Rome on a Harvard awarded Sheldon Traveling Scholarship. He also traveled throughout Europe, and while in France became friends with Catherine Bauer, with whom he would later teach at Berkeley. He studied Italian Renaissance gardens, and Moorish and Iberian Renaissance Spanish gardens, observing their responses to a climate so similar the Mediterranean climate in California. On returning from Europe he worked in a city planning office on the East Coast (1927-1928), then he taught at Ohio State University (1928-1930).

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