Hood Design Studio, Inc. is a social art and design practice based in Oakland, California founded in 1992.

The studio’s practice is tripartite: art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism.

This breadth allows us to understand each place in its scale and context. We respond not with a standard design, but with an approach adaptive to the particulars and specifics of a space.

We strengthen endemic patterns and practices—those ecological and cultural, contemporary and historic, and those that remain unseen or unrecognized. Urban spaces and their objects act as public sculpture, creating new apertures through which to see the emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies around us.

ART

Hood Design Studio’s artistic practice emerges from interest in and observation of the mundane objects and quotidian events populating the public realm. Art forms are gestural, and create meaning through their relation to preexisting patterns and practices. The studio’s work attempts to reveal and activate the benign, looking to existing site elements—the sidewalk, the sign post, the tree canopy, the narrow stream—as infused with emergent beauty, strangeness, subjectivity, and possibility.

LANDSCAPE

Hood Design Studio’s approach to landscape design blurs and complicates standard typologies. Sites can be understood in multiple and contradictory ways that often push against one another, and our approach embraces this fractured nature of spaces. Linguistic references to spaces shifts as their cultural associations develop and transform over time, often in conjunction with changing use. Within this palimpsest, Hood Design uncovers and responds to these linguistic hybridities present in all landscapes. This approach allows us to develop landscape forms that invoke cultural and formal histories, and that offer a multiplicity of unexpected possibilities.

URBANISM

Hood Design Studio’s approach to urbanism looks to the larger landscape context – woodland, watershed, bay – to reveal the unconscious relationships between overlapping environments. Concepts and ideas are derived from this hybrid texture of layered meaning and history, and are applied across the project scope. The studio manifests a vision that rejects the typical expectations associated with often tired vocabulary, and instead creates unanticipated potentials.