The 2017 Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor is Walter Hood

Walter Hood is the Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Knowlton School during Autumn Semester 2017. Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

The 2017 Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor is Walter Hood

Walter Hood is the Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Knowlton School during Autumn Semester 2017. Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

Hood Design Studio is tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. The resulting urban spaces and their objects act as public sculpture, creating new apertures through which to see the surrounding emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies. The Studio’s award winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award.

Hood currently serves at the Goldman Sachs Design Fellow for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, assisting the museum staff in re-conceptualizing 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. 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.

While at Knowlton, Hood will teach in the Glimcher Seminar in the school’s Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning Sections. The seminar examines the intersection of conflict, memory and the landscape, and will culminate in a Banvard Gallery exhibit that explores the history of Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery located in the Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus, OH. The exhibit will run from November 15 to December 14, 2017. 

On October 25 at 5:30pm in the Gui Auditorium, Hood will present as part of the school’s Baumer lecture Series. The talk is free and open to the public.

For more than a decade, the Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professorship is held each year by an internationally acclaimed practitioner in the field of landscape architecture. Previous Glimcher Professors have included Adriaan Geuze, Tom Leader, Peter Walker, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michel Desvigne, Jennifer Guthrie and Shannon Nichol, and our most recent visitor, João Nunes.