Hood Design Studio

Hood Design Studio is a landscape architecture and public art practice founded in 1992 by Walter Hood in Oakland, California, where it still works from San Pablo Avenue. The studio organises its work in three strands: art and fabrication, design and landscape, and research and urbanism. It takes on museum grounds, campuses, parks and civic spaces, usually alongside an architect rather than as prime consultant, and keeps staff numbers in the low dozens. Built work includes the gardens at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and Splash Pad Park in Oakland. Hood is the landscape architect on the Barbican Centre Renewal in London, part of the Allies and Morrison and Asif Khan Studio team.

Recognition for this studio has come from an unusually wide set of directions, and the pattern says something about the work. Walter Hood appeared on the TIME100 list of the most influential people of 2026 and in Wallpaper*’s USA400 of people shaping creative America in 2026. He received a 2026 LILA Honour Award, was the 2024 Vincent Scully Prize recipient, and delivered the 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture lecture. Those are architecture, design and cultural awards as much as landscape ones.

The projects explain why. The African Ancestors Memorial Garden won the 2024 ASLA Professional Award for General Design. The International African American Museum, whose landscape the studio designed, was named among the world’s greatest places in 2024 and took Project of the Year honours. In Piedmont, California, a memorial marking a century since the first Black family was driven from the town has moved forward. This is landscape architecture doing the work of public memory – difficult ground, handled directly rather than softened.

Other work runs in different registers: Yerba Buena’s ecological infrastructure, a rethinking of the office typology as outdoor workspace, and initial steps on Lincoln Center’s West Project.

Hood’s own framing, from a UC Berkeley lecture, is that landscape architecture is more people than plants. Alma Du Solier, a studio principal, received Berkeley CED’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

The studio works from 3001 San Pablo Avenue, Oakland, CA 94608.