ST. MATTHEW'S PARISH CHURCH
Pacific Palisades, California 1981 - 1983
Competition
Our design grew from a collective desire to evoke memories of a beloved parish church lost in a chaparral fire. It was created in collaboration with some 200 parishioners over a period of two years in a participatory design workshop process. The requirements of appropriately fitting a community's ecclesiastical heritage and ritual into a native southern California Canyon setting gave us an approach to embracing the wild native setting as a sequence of landscapes that distinctly manifest the liturgical seasons of the Church. The gardens combine recollections of English country parishes and the California landscape tradition.