Thomas Dolliver Church (April 27, 1902 – August 30, 1978) was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. 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. History Thomas Church was born in Boston, and raised in California, in Ojai and Oakland. He received his B.A. degree in Landscape Architecture from the College of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1922. He then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received his master's degree in City Planning and Landscape Architecture in 1926. After graduating, Church spent six months at the American Academy in Rome on a Harvard awarded Sheldon Traveling Scholarship. He also traveled throughout Europe, and while in France became friends with Catherine Bauer, with whom he would later teach at Berkeley. 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). 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. 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. A 1937 trip was made to Finland, where seeing new modernist works and site planning by Alvar Aalto was influential to his design evolution. He moved to San Francisco in 1932 and established his practice in The city. Church opened his own design studio in 1933, at 402 Jackson Street in San Francisco. He continued to practice there until his retirement in 1977. His own distinctive garden and residence were on Hyde Street, in the Russian Hill, San Francisco district. Church was a longtime contributor to Architectural Forum, House Beautiful, and Sunset magazines, bringing his design ideas with examples to his design peers and the public. In 1951 Church was awarded the Fine Arts Medal, for Landscape Architecture, by the American Institute of Architects. In 1973, Church was elected to the National Academy of Design, as an Associate Academician. He was also awarded