Thomas Church (landscape architect)

[1] [5] He then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received his master's degree in City Planning and Landscape Architecture in 1926.

[1][3] After graduating, Church spent six months at the American Academy in Rome on a Harvard awarded Sheldon Traveling Scholarship.

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).

[1][3] He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1930, and was a Special Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Landscape Architecture for the remainder of that year.

[1][3] He also went into private practice in 1930 to design the Pasatiempo Estates in the Santa Cruz area, with Second Bay Tradition style architect William Wurster.

[3] A 1937 trip was made to Finland, where seeing new modernist works and site planning by Alvar Aalto was influential to his design evolution.

"[7] They are: Church used the Modernist design principles for freedom of elements, such as the forms of spaces and features, and a sense of movement.

"[3] He could also use historicist design principles when the site called for it, such as the formal lines of the Memorial Courtyard (1965) beside the San Francisco Opera House.

[4][8] Others include the Mrs. Clinton Walker House in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California,[9] and the Bloedel Reserve and Lakewold Gardens in Washington state.

[3] "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.

"[2] The subsequent founders and practitioners of the Modern California Landscape include Garrett Eckbo, Robert Royston, James C. Rose, and Dan Kiley.