Thomas Church was born in
Boston, and raised in California, in
Ojai and
Oakland. He then attended the
Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received his
master's degree in City Planning and Landscape Architecture in 1926. 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). In 1951 Church was awarded the Fine Arts Medal, for Landscape Architecture, by the
American Institute of Architects. They are: • Unity — the consideration of the design as a whole, integrating the house and its gardens with a free flow between them. • Function — the relation of the outdoor recreational and social areas to their interior counterparts, and of the outdoor service areas to the household's needs, to please and serve the people who live in them. • Simplicity — upon which rests the aesthetic and economic success of the design. • Scale — relating the different design parts, features, and areas to one another, to create a whole an integrated landscape design. Church used the Modernist design principles for freedom of elements, such as the forms of spaces and features, and a sense of movement. When possible, he favored creating multiple viewpoints, instead of a traditional single axis. "A garden should have no beginning and no end," he wrote in
Gardens Are for People, "and should be pleasing when seen from any angle, not only from the house." Others include the
Mrs. Clinton Walker House in
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and the
Bloedel Reserve and
Lakewold Gardens in Washington state. He also worked on a number of larger non-residential landscape commissions. He worked on campus master plans for
UC Berkeley,
Stanford University,
UC Santa Cruz,
Harvey Mudd College,
Woodside Priory School, and the
Wascana Centre in Saskatchewan. He designed the grounds of the
Embassy of the United States, Havana, the
General Motors Research Laboratory in
Detroit (1949–1953), the
Des Moines Art Center, the Hotel El Panama in
Panama City, the
Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and
Parkmerced (1941–1951) in southwestern San Francisco. He was the landscape design consultant to
Stanford University for 30 years, beginning in the late 1940s. He served on the Stanford Architectural Advisory Council from 1960 to 1978, that President J.E. Wallace Sterling created. "Church was trying to put a layer of continuity around the original buildings and the new (ones), he was working on a (campus) landscape that was meant to tie all this together." ==Death==