Hood Design Studio

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.

The landscape design concept for the International African American Museum is inspired by both the cultural significance of the museum’s story and the local landscape of the Carolina lowcountry. The landscape strategy takes cues from the tradition of ‘hush harbors’—landscapes where enslaved Africans would gather often in secret, outside the view of slave owners, to […]