Thomas Dolliver Church (1902-1978), called "Dolliver" by his family and "Tommy" by his friends, was born in Boston but grew up in Oakland, California. He received his undergrad degree in landscape architecture at the University of California-Berkeley. He later received his master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Church traveled to Italy and Spain for six months on a Sheldon fellowship that he was awarded at Harvard. After returning from Europe he taught at Ohio State University for a year before returning to the San Francisco Bay area. At the age of thirty church opened an office in San Francisco and continued to practice out of the same office until his retirement in 1977.
At the time that Church started practicing, the neoclassic movement was still the design style of choice. Thomas’s education at UC-Berkeley and Harvard, along with his travels to Europe, instilled in him a sense of the Classical form , which is a formal arrangement on an axial plane. However, Church is known as one who opened the door to the Modern movement in landscape architecture with what came to be known as the “California Style.” In his book Gardens are for People, Church outlines four principles for his design process, they are: “Unity, which is the consideration of the schemes as a whole, both house and garden; function, which is the relation of the practical service areas to the needs of the household and the relation of the decorative areas to the desires and pleasures of those who use it; simplicity, upon which may rest both the economic and aesthetic success of the layout; and scale, which gives us a pleasant relation of parts to one another.” It should be pointed out that while he used the Modern idea of freedom of elements, such as form, line, and movement, Thomas never abandoned the solid design principles of the past. One of the things that made his designs both unique and influential was the seamless marriage of two opposite design principles. When looking at a Church design you will see that he did not use, or have, a cookie cutter style instead he believed that every site had its own unique set of parameters. Another design element that Church often used was the idea of the outdoor living space or dividing the landscape into separate “rooms.”
The majority of Church’s work was residential, in which he reportedly did over 2000 designs. His most noted residential work is the Donnell Gardens in Sonoma County, California. He also worked on a number of larger projects. He oversaw the master planning of UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Cruz, Harvey Mudd College, and the Wascana Center in Regina, Saskatchewan. He designed the grounds of the American Embassy in Havana, Cuba, the General Motors Research Center in Detroit, the Des Moines Art Center, the hotel El Panama, Panama City, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Thomas Church had a long and distinguished career as a Landscape Architect. The modern residential landscape in California, and possibly the whole of the US, as we know it was birthed from a small group of designers, of which he was the founding father.
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