In Walter Hood's teaching and practice, he is committed to the development of environments which reflect their place and time specifically through how people inhabit various geographies. Our interest in the re-construction of urban landscapes seeks to build palimpsest by developing new elements, spatial forms and objects which validate their existing familiar context. The Studio utilizes ‘research’ in lieu of standardized analytical practices. 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 an artist, designer, and educator. He regularly exhibits and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally, while his studio engages in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research. He currently serves at the Goldman Sachs Design Fellow for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, assisting the museum staff in reconceptualizing its public spaces. Other recent honors include the AIA Award for Collaborative Achievement and a USA Character Approved Honor by NBC Universal. In 2010, Hood received the Cooper‐Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design. He is also a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Hood's work was recently featured in Art Institute of Chicago’s “Learning Modern” exhibition, and was featured prominently in the February 2010 issue of “Art in America”. Last spring, he was a selected winner for the Venice Biennale and exhibited two projects: a green street and plaza for Center Street in Berkeley, California, and the Greenprint, an urban landscape vision for the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hood's firm, Hood Design (http://www.wjhooddesign.com/home.html), is a cultural practice committed to creating environments in which people live work and play. The studio practice engages urban landscape where a collective density of inhabitants share physical, social, political and economic resources. This multidimensional context is the setting for the development of powerful sculpted expressions that explore site specific social and environmental processes. Landscapes and built elements emerge as improvised acts, familiar yet reshaped into something new.