Hood Design Studio is a landscape architecture and social art practice. The studio’s cultural practice is tripartite: Everyday, Lifeways & Commemoration. The three lenses allow the studio to understand the idiosyncrasies of each place and respond with an approach adaptive to the particulars of place and its people. Through this practice the studio strengthens endemic patterns and practices both ecological and cultural, contemporary and historic – particularly those that remain unseen or unrecognized. The resulting work creates new apertures through which to see the emergent beauty and strangeness around us.

The Everyday takes over-looked mundane elements of landscape, everyday places, in-betweens, places of work and worship, and rethinks our relationships with these spaces. The Oakland Museum of California was originally conceived by architect Kevin Roche in the 1960’s as a museum with a public garden for the city. Due to social fears at the time, the museum chose to wall off its perimeter. The renovation opened the box – creating a series of openings in the concrete walls – inviting the city into a newly renovated public garden and performance lawn. The result is a new vibrant civic space for Oakland. The Nvidia Campus in Santa Clara, California rethought working outside, and drew upon the agrarian culture of California by creating a photo-voltaic covered forest with tree canopy walks and treehouses to allow people to work outside in the temperate California climate. The hybrid landscape promotes wellbeing in the workplace and inspires new ways of thinking.

Lifeways studies the social patterns and practices of a place and introduces provocations to enhance civic life. In the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, the landscape framework overlays the cultural heritage of the neighborhood and its rich history of jazz with the ecological history of the Lake Michigan lakefront and urban food production. The resulting landscape allows for multiple narratives to coexist at any given time. At the Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture a series of five performance spaces are designed to respond to various characteristics of the landscape. The spaces were staked by hand and designed in the field over the course of a week with the school. Each space inspires participants to see the landscape in a new way and inspires new ways of performing.

Commemoration seeks to remember, embrace and celebrate. The Johnson brothers wrote Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing, the black national anthem. To commemorate their impact on the nation a park is being constructed in the La Villa neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. The words of the song hold up a lifted lawn – embracing the song and the nation. In Charleston, South Carolina the International African American Museum features a set of allegoric gardens of African diaspora and a reflecting fountain commemorating the Atlantic Passage. The fountain paving field consist of serialized figures based on the Brooks Map. The fountain ebbs and flows revealing and concealing the figures as one looks west to Sullivan’s Island and beyond to the point of no return.