Tommy & Billy
24/01/30 - 5:00 p.m.
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 sizeable dossier works executed both in collaboration and individually. While Wurster shunned the whole-scale adoption of modernist ideas from abroad, he used them to temper and adapt long-established California architectural traditions. Sharing these same inclinations with Wurster, Church produced an impressive number of landscapes in Northern California and 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 examines the course of their buildings and landscapes as they evolved over several decades, deriving their designs in response to their physical and social environments.
About Marc Treib
Marc Treib is a Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a prolific author focusing 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.
About West Coast Modern League
The West Coast Modern League is a leading voice for modern architecture and design on Canada’s west coast. Established in 2013, the League is an independent, Vancouver-based, nonprofit society dedicated to celebrating and advancing the understanding and appreciation of architecture, urbanism, and design with a particular focus on the southern coastal regions of British Columbia. We are a volunteer-based organization led by a Board of Directors composed of architects, curators, critics, and professionals passionate about West Coast architecture and the allied arts.