Tommy & Bill – 2024.01.30

January 30, 2024 from 5:00–7:00pm

Reception + Visiting Speaker
Presented by the West Coast Modern League
Hosted by Inform Interiors, 50 Water Street, Vancouver, BC

Marc Treib, Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and prolific author on modern landscape and architecture, joined the West Coast Modern League at Inform Interiors for Tommy & Bill, a talk on the landscapes and architecture of 20th century California’s Thomas Church and William Wurster.

Beginning in the 1930s, but especially during the immediate postwar years, William Wilson Wurster and Thomas Dolliver Church—in architecture and landscape architecture respectively—included in their sizable dossiers works executed both in collaboration and individually. While Wurster shunned the wholescale adoption of modernist ideas from abroad, he used them to temper and adapt long-established California architectural traditions. Sharing with Wurster these same predilections, Church produced an impressive number of landscapes both in Northern California and in the United States more widely, but always rooted to their sites, environments, and clients’ lives, whether ultimately deriving modernist form and space or those more traditional.

Tommy and Bill examined the course of their buildings and landscapes as they evolved over several decades, deriving their designs in response to their physical and social environments.

Lyman House, 1941. William Wurster. Photograph by Roger Sturtevant.

Donnell Garden, 1948. Thomas Church. Photograph by Marc Treib.

Meet the Speaker

Marc Treib

Marc Treib is Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a prolific author whose writing focuses on modern landscape and architecture in the United States, Scandinavia, and Japan. His books include the edited volumes Thomas Church, Landscape Architect: Designing a Modern California Landscape, and An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster. Coming next spring are Poodling: On The Just Shaping of Shrubbery, and Noguchi’s Gardens: Landscape as Sculpture, both from ORO Editions.