Walter J. Hood

Walter Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA. He is also Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

Founded in 1992, Hood Design Studio, Inc. is a social art and design practice with three areas of work: art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. The studio’s work consists largely of architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research. Project research includes archival and oral histories, physical, environmental and social patterns and practices, to uncover familiar and untold stories. These practices are layered together through an idiosyncratic improvisational design process that builds on architecture and urbanism’s rich tradition which yields familiar, yet new spaces, forms and elements. They assimilate the past and look forward into the future.

Hood is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the 2021 recipient of the Architectural League’s President’s Medal award.