Thomas Dolliver Church was an American landscape architect. 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.
Background
Thomas Dolliver Church was born on April 27, 1902 in Boston, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Alfred Church and Wilda Wilson. His father, an inventor, is credited with inventing the first popular washing machine; his mother was an elocutionist and drama coach. After his parents separated, Church moved to Ojai Valley, California, with his mother and sister, settling near his maternal grandparents. Church showed an early interest in gardening; at age twelve he designed and did all the work for his first garden area on a slope adjoining his home.
Education
After graduating from Berkeley High School in 1918, Church entered the University of California at Berkeley with the intention of following the Church family tradition of studying law. During his second year, however, a course in the history of garden design persuaded him to change his major. He graduated in 1923 with a B. A. in landscape architecture. He then returned to the Boston area to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, entering in 1924 and graduating with an M. S. in 1926. Awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship while at Harvard, Church used his grant to visit gardens in France, Spain, and Italy, and then wrote his master's thesis concerning their adaptability to California, which shares many Mediterranean-like conditions.
Career
Since the turn of the century, California garden design had reflected traditional ideas imposed by landscape architects arriving from the East, who made the site fit the design, rather than the reverse. Church's recognition at an early age that climate and site conditions were important factors in garden design would be hallmarks of his long career. With his formal education completed, Church taught as an assistant professor at Ohio State University from 1927 to 1929 and at the University of California at Berkeley from 1929 to 1930. In 1929 he began work with the architect William Wurster, designing the landscaping and siting the houses for the Pasatiempo Estates, a community of homes built around a golf course near Santa Cruz, Calif. Wurster designed a home/studio on the grounds for Church and his wife. Church opened his own office in San Francisco in 1932, and he continued to practice there until his retirement in 1977. Throughout the 1930's, Church's gardens reflected traditional design principles set in areas that were compact and clearly defined, a style appropriate to the austere financial climate of the Great Depression. During this period, however, Church became increasingly aware of, and excited by, current trends in art and architecture. Cubism with its expression of different spatial perspectives and the International Style's emphasis on form following function in architecture began to influence the development of his landscape designs. On a trip to Europe to see firsthand the architecture of Le Corbusier and other avant-garde practitioners, he met Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect, who was experimenting with sinuous forms in both his buildings and his furnishings. Curvilinear forms and abstract patterns would appear in future Church garden designs as he shifted from the geometric, center-axis designs of the past to accommodate the demands of the site and existing house. Church was no dogmatist of either the classical or the modern school. While rejecting the notion that a garden must conform to certain rules, he learned from the past and noted that good design played an equally important role in contemporary gardens where simplicity, function, and relatively carefree maintenance would predominate. This approach reflected the California way of life, where people were moving outside again, encouraged by a new kind of architecture that opened onto the outdoors. They wanted spaces that suited their needs in a lifestyle emphasizing recreation and multifaceted use of their yards. Dispensing with broad front lawns, he incorporated barbecue areas, terraces, play areas for children, small gardens, and pools within artistic landscape schemes. By the innovative use of walls, fences, and trellises, Church was able to create oases of calm and privacy in both small and large spaces. He could make small yards seem larger by his ability to interrelate various functional areas within the design as a whole, and he had the ability to site buildings to their environment by relating the use of outdoor space to the architecture of the house, creating an effortless flow between the two. During the 1930's, Church worked on many private gardens, the first of approximately two thousand that he would eventually design in many states and abroad, but primarily in California. This number is especially impressive given the fact that Church not only designed them, but also played a role in supervising their construction, paying close attention to the selection of materials and plants, always important elements in his artistic vision. He was known to appear in clients' gardens years after his designs had been executed to see how things were progressing, and he was not shy about pruning here and there if he felt it necessary. While Church was focusing on this private work, his firm was also contracted to do a select number of public projects. One of his best-known commissions in the San Francisco area was the design of the War Memorial Opera House Garden Court, done in 1935. Other large projects followed over the years: the Treasure Island Exposition Garden in 1940, the Valencia Gardens housing project in 1944, the large Parkmerced housing project built through the 1940's--all in San Francisco--and the General Motors Research Center in Warren, Michigan, in 1945, designed in collaboration with architect Eero Saarinen. Church also received many major campus contracts. In the 1950's and 1960's he was the landscape consultant for Stanford University; he designed the master plans for the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz in the 1960's; and he also designed the master plans for Harvey Mudd College and Scripps College, both in Claremont, California, in the 1960's. While winning fame for these projects, Church's first love remained residential garden design. During twenty-five years following World War II, he executed some of his most renowned designs. An increased sophistication in the manipulation of garden forms was evident in his work even while the themes of unity between landscape and house, the proper scale of elements within the whole design, and the imaginative selection of natural and manmade materials continued to be his hallmarks. The designs were diverse, reflecting the sites' demands and his own flexibility. In the 1960's he even returned to the classical, center-line garden when either the site or the client called for it. During these years Church became well known through his own numerous articles on garden design or other author's articles about him and his designs that appeared in such magazines as Bonanza--the weekly magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle--Sunset, House and Garden, California Arts and Architecture (where he was on the editorial staff), House Beautiful, Landscape Architecture, and Architectural Forum. Furthering the public's awareness of Church's work was the publication of his two popular books on garden design: Gardens Are for People, in 1955 (revised by his associates for a second edition in 1983), and Your Private World: A Study of Intimate Gardens, in 1969. He died in San Francisco.
Achievements
Church exercised further influence over the future of modern landscape design by employing and teaching many talented young landscape architects, including Douglas Baylis, Lawrence Halprin, Casey Kawamoto, and Robert Royston. Church himself received numerous awards, including the Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1951, the Gold Medal of the New York Architectural League in 1953, the Gold Medal of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1976, and designation as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. In 1992 the American Society of Landscape Architects bestowed its prestigious Classic Award, recognizing significant contributions to landscape architecture, on Church's Donnell Garden designed in 1948 in Sonoma, California.
