When Walter Hood was a student at North Carolina A&T, Charles Fountain, Ph.D., commanded him to take a semester off and take a co-op job in Asheville.
Hood resisted — the co-op would delay his college graduation — but not for long. Fountain, who founded A&T’s landscape architecture program, was a dominating presence on campus and like a second father to Hood. Students didn’t question Fountain, and Hood wasn’t about to start.
So Hood took the National Park Service co-op position in Asheville. That experience led to Hood’s first job — with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. — and set in motion his remarkable career as a landscape designer, artist and educator.
Hood will return to D.C. Oct. 4 to receive his latest award: the Vincent Scully Prize, presented by the National Building Museum. Named for the late Yale University art historian and architecture critic, this award recognizes excellence in practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design. The museum praised Hood for creating “ecologically sustainable spaces that connect with urban communities and help empower marginalized communities” and seeking “to uncover and strengthen layers of meaning present in all landscapes — ecological, cultural, contemporary and historic.”
If that characterization makes it difficult to pigeonhole Hood, that’s by, well, design.
Hood’s work is difficult to characterize. “I’ve spent my career trying not to isolate myself within a particular profession because I enjoy a breadth of work,” he said.
“I’ve spent my career trying not to isolate myself within a particular profession because I enjoy a breadth of work,” Hood said. “Every project is different, and every project creatively demands that I have a respect for that context. I think my work fits the parameters of the Scully Prize because I’ve embraced history as a major component of my work even when it wasn’t mainstream to do so.”
Hood, a past recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, was also the first speaker in the landscape architecture program’s Charles Fountain Memorial Lecture Series, a partnership with the University of California at Berkeley, where Hood is a faculty member.
Since graduating from A&T in 1981, Hood has traveled along two professional tracks. In 1992, he founded Hood Design Studio. This social art and design practice based in Oakland, Calif., has created landscapes, art, exhibitions and urban designs for parks, gardens, museums, communities and public spaces around the world. Hood also is chair and professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design at University of California, Berkeley.
In recent years, Hood completed the landscape design for new the Intuit Dome, the new home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and created a park and 30-foot aluminum sculpture in Arlington, Va., that commemorates a former settlement founded by former free and enslaved persons after the Civil War. Works in progress include the redesign of an historic park in Houston and the revitalization of a park adjacent to New York City’s Lincoln Center. Hood also is designing The Peter Oliver Pavilion Gallery, a new park in Winston-Salem, and Hugh McColl Park, a revamped community space in Charlotte, Hood’s hometown, that honors the former CEO of Bank of America.
Hood’s most notable recent work is the highly acclaimed International African American Museum that opened in 2023 in Charleston, S.C. Located at the site of Gadsden's Wharf, estimated to be the entry point for 40 percent of the enslaved Africans entering the United States, the museum building itself floats on pillars above the site’s hallowed ground. Hood and his team designed the landscape underneath.
The multidimensional landscape includes grass-covered dunes and native plants that reflect the African diaspora, gardens that allow for reflection, and five abstract kneeling sculptures that let visitors see these human figures in a multitude of ways. The landscape’s defining feature is the Tide Tribute, a shallow fountain whose water level changes throughout the day like the tide. When the water rises, it appears at certain angles to merge with the water in Charleston Harbor. When it recedes, it exposes figures in relief on the fountain’s bottom — figures that evoke the notorious Brookes diagram that shows men, women and children crammed into and chained within the hold of a British slave ship.
“I want people to be in a place where they can feel sad but they can also feel joy and happiness,” Hood said. “That to me is the resilient spirit that has manifested in the African American experience here in America. The beautiful thing about our culture is that it’s not compartmentalized. There’s always this sorrow within us — and there’s also joy.”
The upcoming awards ceremony will give Hood a moment to reflect — about his A&T experience, which gave him a strong sense of identity and self; about Fountain, whose instructions were life-changing; and his work, which has embraced multiple interests, disciplines and challenges.
“The first 20 years of my career was just me with my head down making work,” Hood said. “The last few years have been bountiful. It has been great to be recognized now not by a particular profession, but with broader societal awards. I’ve been really blessed.”
