(Re)working with Thomas Church

Abstract

Then When I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s ‘Church gardens’ were familiar to all of us, and they were frequent topics of discussion. Thomas D. Church's landscapes appeared regularly in the leading garden periodicals of the day such as Sunset and House Beautiful, and we looked there for new work and sensible ideas. His book Gardens are for People (1955) was a standard telerence in the design studio, and in our school years we visited a number of his gardens on excursions. Among them was the much-publicized Donnell garden in Sonoma, California, which was regarded as a model, utilizing the. site and its native vegetation, but mixing the existing conditions with a vocabulary of new forms and spatial ideas. The faculty frequently talked with us about Church's work, and his office was offered as a prime example of a successful design practice: focused on design and people, but economically viable. The influence of his work on my generation of landscape architects has been considerable.