Walter Hood (1958- ) is an artist, designer, landscape architect and professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design Department (Chair, 1998-2002). Hood was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has spent more than two decades living and working in Oakland, California. He received his bachelor’s degree in Architecture from North Carolina University (1981) and received both Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (1989). Since 1992, his firm, Hood Design Studio, has participated in research, art installations, architectural and landscape commissions, and urban design. Hood's innovative public spaces are known for the way they embrace the essence of urban environments and for their links to urban redevelopment and neighborhood revitalization. His projects such as Oakland’s Lafayette Square and Splash Pad Park have been lauded as transformational. Other significant projects include the gardens and landscape of the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, the landscape for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the Sculpture Terrace for the Jackson Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming. As a leading national landscape architect, Hood’s winning competition entries include designs for the Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta, GA; and the public artwork, Garden Passage, in Pittsburgh, PA.

Hood's published monographs include Culture Now, National Design Triennial,(Princeton Architectural Press, NY, 2000), Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations (Poltroon Press, 1993), Urban Diaries (Spacemaker Press, 1997), and Everyday Urbanism, Urban Diaries: Improvisation in West Oakland, CA (Monacelli Press, Inc., 1999). His essay "Macon Memories" is included in Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Most recently, he edited the volume Black Landscapes Matter with Grace Mitchell Tada (University of Virginia Press, 2020).

His work was featured in the 2006 exhibit, "The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation," at the Van Alen Institute in New York. Hood was the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design and has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad. Recently, his work was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2020).

Hood has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture (1997); received a Distinguished Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010); is a recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award (2017); was awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2019); and is a MacArthur Fellow (2019).

He teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley and is the creative director of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA.

Sources: Hood Design Studio website, www.hooddesignstudio.com College of Environmental Design website, www.ced.berkeley.edu/ced/faculty-staff/walter-hood Walter Hood Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.