Walter Hood is Professor and former Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland, California. Hood has worked in a variety of settings including architecture, urban design, community planning, environmental art, and research. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture, 1997. He has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad. His work was recently featured in the exhibition and publication, “Open” New Designs For Public Spaces, Van Allen Institute, New York; Metropolis Magazine; the New York Times; and Dwell magazine. His firm designed the gardens and landscape for the New De Young Museum in San Francisco with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Hood’s published monographs: Urban Diaries and Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations illuminate his unique approach to the design of urban landscapes. These works won an ASLA Research award in 1996. His essay “Macon Memories” is featured in Sites of Memory, Princeton Press, 2001. Hood participated in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Revelatory Landscapes” exhibition, 2000-2001. He is currently researching and writing a book entitled Urban Landscapes; American Landscape Typologies. His area of teaching, the American Urban Landscape, is intertwined with his design work creating a didactic approach to the design of urban landscapes.

Artist’s Statement
Sketches of the Imagination using watercolor, pen and crayon on paper.