Thomas Hines

Biography

Thomas S. Hines, UCLA professor in the departments of History and Architecture since 1974, died on July 26 at the age of 90. Born in Oxford, MS, in 1936, Hines earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mississippi in 1958 and completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin in 1971. His dissertation on Chicago architect Daniel Burnham became the basis of his first scholarly book, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner, which won the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association. After accepting a position in the department of History at UCLA in 1974, Hines shifted his scholarly focus to Los Angeles and Southern California and continued writing in a canonical style that focused on leading figures in the region’s architectural culture. One of Hines’s most celebrated works, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (California, 1982), explored the Austrian architect’s work in its Southern California context, emphasizing the links between landscape, migration, design, and urban development. In 2000, Hines published Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform (Monacelli, 2000), a study of Gill’s contributions to Southern California modernism. Hines returned to his southern roots in publishing William Faulkner and the Tangible Past (California, 1996), a study of literature, memory, and landscape, and he completed his oeuvre on Los Angeles modernism with the publication of Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970 (Rizzoli, 2010). A Getty and Guggenheim scholar, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hines made major contributions to the study of twentieth-century modern architecture and to the history of Los Angeles, a founder of the city’s historiography long before it attracted a diverse cohort of twenty-first-century scholars. He was the first, for example, to write about the debacle of the Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium, a revisited topic among Los Angeles and U.S. urban historians. Hines was an architectural historian, but also a social and cultural historian and biographer, attuned not just to the role of talented individuals and distinctive buildings, but also to their social, political, and economic contexts. His interdisciplinary style reflected his dual appointments in UCLA’s departments of History and Architecture, where he shaped the education of diverse communities of UCLA students. A longtime resident of Westwood who lived in a Richard Neutra-designed complex, Hines lived within his scholarly imagination.

Eric Avila
August 2026

Please see also: https://aud.ucla.edu/news-events/news/remembering-thomas-hines