New Collection Guides for Architecture and Landscape Architecture Collections Now Available

Blog post contributed by Taylor Wolford and Phillip MacDonald, Library Associates

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce that the newly updated collection guides for the George Matsumoto Architectural Drawings and Other Papers (MC 00042) and Reginald D. Tillson Landscape Architecture Papers (MC 00592) are now available. 

George Matsumoto was a Japanese-American architect and educator who is most known for his award-winning, modernist designs. In 1948, Matsumoto became a faculty member at the School (now College) of Design of North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering (now North Carolina State University). During his tenure at the School of Design, Matsumoto won more than thirty awards for his residential work, and his achievements in design were widely published. In 1961, George Matsumoto went on to join the faculty at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley and opened his own firm. He stopped teaching in 1967 but continued his architecture work until 1991.

The new addition to the collection includes materials about Matsumoto’s long and distinguished architectural career. Highlights of the addition are architectural records, including drawings and sketches, that signify Matsumoto's architectural influences, as well as his approach to project development over time. Additional materials include correspondence, publications, scrapbooks, photographs, contracts, an oral history interview, and other related architectural records that document the commercial and residential work of George Matsumoto and Associates. The materials range from 1930 to 2009, with the bulk from 1940 to 1979.

Reginald D. Tillson was a landscape architect in High Point, North Carolina, who designed significant improvements to the built environment of High Point and other communities of the Piedmont Triad area. His early career focused on residential design work for the wealthy and upper-middle-class residents of High Point, which at the time was a prosperous center of the textile and furniture industries. In the 1950s and the following decades, as North Carolina's population grew and planning and development trends evolved, Tillson's work grew in scale and complexity. He designed dozens of subdivisions and grounds for schools, churches, and hospitals. Overall, his career provides a unique view into planning and landscape architecture practice in the Southeast during decades of immense technological and social change.

The Reginald D. Tillson Landscape Architecture Papers contains drawings, sketches, specifications, correspondence, notes, plant guides, and other materials that document the landscape design work of Tillson from the 1920s to the 1970s. The collection also contains an oral history interview with his son, David Tillson, in 2016. These materials encompass Tillson's work as a landscape architect, creating designs for small-scale residential locations, large-scale private subdivision, public parks, public housing projects, schools, churches, and hospitals. The collection ranges from 1906 to 2016, with the bulk detailing Tillson's career as a practicing landscape architect between 1928 and 1969.

The George Matsumoto Architectural Drawings and Other Papers and Reginald D. Tillson Landscape Architecture Papers are now available for research. For more information or to request access to these records, please use our online request form. The Special Collections Research Center contains a growing collection of architecture and landscape architecture records, which can be accessed by searching our digitized collections and archival collection guides.