The 2026 LILA Honour Award is presented to Walter J. Hood, designer, educator, and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Since establishing the studio in 1992, Hood has built a body of work that ranges from early neighbourhood parks in Oakland to major civic and memorial landscapes. He is recognised for expanding landscape architecture into a practice of cultural memory and visibility.

Across parks, museum grounds, civic spaces, ordinary urban landscapes, lectures and writing, he has consistently shown that public space can never be a neutral ground but rather a field where histories are buried or revealed and where communities are ignored or recognised. His work has demonstrated that landscape architecture can become a civic instrument through which what has been suppressed may re-emerge into public view.

This is especially important in his work with Black landscapes and public memory. Projects such as the African Ancestors Memorial Garden at the International African American Museum in Charleston show how landscape can confront a history of violence without reducing it to a single monument. At Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park in Jacksonville, the memory of the Johnson brothers is brought into the present through lifted ground, a shotgun house, performance space, poetry and neighbourhood memory. In these works, commemoration becomes an active public condition that insists on visibility.

Hood’s early parks and public spaces in Oakland dealt with social practices and people often pushed towards the margins of civic attention. Lafayette Square Park is especially important because it takes seriously the possibility that sharply different social realities can occupy the same public ground.

Hood uses scale with particular intelligence, sometimes allowing lost structures or former urban patterns to return as simple spatial measures, brought to the scale of the body. His work with colour, rhythm, objects, planting, art and architectural fragments gives social memory a visible form that remains deliberately unresolved.

Hood’s contribution has been recognised within and beyond the design disciplines, from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture in 2009 and the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019, to the Vincent Scully Prize in 2024, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture in 2025, and his inclusion in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2026.

The LILA Honour Award recognises Walter Hood for outstanding imaginative design, and for placing that design in the service of social justice. His work has expanded the language of landscape architecture by allowing buried traces and marginalised communities to participate in the form and meaning of public space.