Spring 2026

Welcome to Under the Hood.

Let’s explore the creative ideas driving the studio

2026 kicks off with two big promotions. We are excited to announce Alma Du Solier as Partner and Sarita Schreiber as Social Art Director. In honor of their new leadership roles at Hood Design Studio, we asked each to share a VISION for the practice.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

“There’s a lot of innovation and vision when you’re trying to connect things.”

NVIDIA's campus design features two tree houses that invite staff to step outside, seamlessly extending their workday into the landscape.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Jason O’Rear

HOOD sought to push the envelope, creating a landscape that is rooted in and reflective of the region’s identity.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Jason O’Rear

SUBTLE CONNECTIONS

ALMA DU SOLIER, Partner

I don’t necessarily consider myself a visionary in any form or fashion — I wouldn’t even know how to define it as a practitioner, to be perfectly honest, but nonetheless, I have a vision. My vision is that we are building a collective space that encourages different methods of working, so that innovation comes from the process.

I believe in “having reasons” for doing things and I define “design rules” to organize my thinking. Some people call that being rigorous; some say that is being rational, which could be as see as the opposite on the “by-the-book versus innovative thinking” spectrum. There’s a gray zone between the two extremes of doing something different every single time and obeying a strict standard. I operate in the middle.

A lot of people that come to work here understand that a little bit. Some are more comfortable than others in this gray zone, but ultimately, that’s my vision for Hood Design: to create a practice in which all of us have some level of independence, some level of innovation, but also that we can also be comfortable in a context that can sometimes even be beautifully predictable.

If we consider innovation as a way to create uniqueness, it can be found in the subtle things we engage with everyday. Design can be as simple as the small line on the paving. For example, the NVIDIA Campus in Santa Clara is a four-acre landscape. Everything is designed on a grand scale, with large, tree-house-like pavilions and bold arbors. My collaborative role was to develop a landscape that knits these dissimilar pieces together: the feature objects that call for visual attention, green infrastructure that moves water through the site, and humble paving that binds it all together.

Our approach was to deploy a unifying palette, however we introduced a subtle shift in the material palette in response to the path of the sun as it traverses the site. The campus has a shady side and a sunny side. In the afternoons, the warm Santa Clara weather invites people to find cool places outdoors. In the shade, the paving and decomposed granite is in cool gray tones. As you move into the sun, the materials shift to tan and yellow—the same textures and compositions, just with a different color palette. It isn’t radical, yet when you walk around the campus, you sense the change; it gives you a unique experience. That is the kind of work I want to continue to see come out of our studio: work you admire but also feel.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Seymour Lu

“My role maintains a fragile equilibrium as we work between the speculative and the professional.”

Black Towers/Black Power is a hybrid collage of models, screen prints, and video.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SFMOMA

SPACE FOR THE UNKNOWN

SARITA SCHREIBER, Social Art Director

Vision is an idea unconstrained by existing conditions. Being a visionary is a less about visualizing an end and more about being courageous enough to insist on space for the unknown. My role in the studio is to have faith in the dream to and protect. As we grow our social art practice, we make room for the undefined, so that each project is responsive rather than unquestioningly following a set of predetermined processes.

Our installation Black Towers/Black Power (created for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at MOMA is now part of the permanent collection at SFMOMA) is an imagining of a different world — one that doesn’t conform to the boundaries and conditions of the San Pablo corridor in West Oakland as we presently know it. The drawings, sculptural models, and video present a series of high-rise towers. Each corresponds to the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, which includes demands for freedom, education, housing, and ending police brutality. It’s a thought exercise that provides a visionary roadmap. We may have figured out all the problems, but we hope our vision serves as provocation to spark critical thought and dialogue.

The challenge before me as Social Art Director is to articulate Hood’s social art practice to a larger public. This is not a new practice, our work has long been connected to and acted upon social social and cultural phenomena. To achieve our goal, we move through a rigorous number of iterations, testing form, material, scale. Our process defines an ethos that is specific to the art practice, and also extends to the entire company. Ultimately, we each have a role to play in developing a vision — one that only becomes legible when each member of our staff brings their own personality and interests to the project.

 

Honoring the legacy of the Johnson brothers in the heart of Jacksonville’s historic LaVilla neighborhood.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Toni Smailagic

NEWS  

Jarrett Fuller, host of Scratching the Surface podcast, sat down with Walter Hood to discuss landscapes as a medium, subverting typologies, and design as a cultural practice. Listen to their conversation here.

HOOD is one three finalists selected by Swords Into Plowshares to reimagine Charlottesville’s removed Robert E. Lee statue. Working with reclaimed melted bronze from the Confederate monument, teams were asked to create new public artwork reflecting multiracial democracy and presented on March 14 at Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

In Metropolis, writer Diana Budds features Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing park in Jacksonville, FL as small public spaces advancing reparative urbanism.

Walter Hood joined a stellar line-up of speakers for In Focus: Transformation, the latest edition of The World Around hosted by The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. 

On March 12, principal Paul Peters shared the studio’s landscape design process for the African Ancestors Garden with the American Horticultural Society.

Mark your calendar. On April 21, Walter will lecture at the Architecture Association in London. 

Fall 2025

Welcome to Under the Hood.

Let’s explore the creative ideas driving the studio

This Fall we have CROSSING on our minds. At a time rife with polarization, public art encourages us to intersect, collaborate, and commune. Hood Design Studio’s Walter Hood and Sarita Schreiber consider CROSSING as something physical and technical — and mythical and abstract.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JonnyArchives

“As an artist, public art allows me to move away from commemoration and memorialization, which can be a narrative pigeonhole, and move toward just expression. The work doesn’t always have to be heavy — it can be light, as in Migrations or The Nest .”

The Nest reflects the Charlotte’s resilience, unity, and evolution, serving as both a focal point and an invitation to connect.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Charlotte Business Journal

EXPRESSION MARK

WALTER HOOD, Founder + Creative Director

Being Southern, the word “crossing” immediately takes me to “crossroads.” These places where two or three things come together are places of importance with their own mythologies. The crossroad is where you go to meet the devil to get your mojo on. Or, particularly in the English landscape, it’s where people who were considered unholy by the church were buried, so that their restless spirits would confused and not haunt the living.

A crossing is something that is real and it’s also kind of an imaginary place that elides a fixed location. Similarly, our public art projects shift between figural and abstract, between physical and conceptual.

The studio’s public art practice grew out of an interest in history and commemoration. It is challenging in architecture and landscape architecture to express a level of subjectivity that’s not immediately pedagogically explained. We found in our art installations that through making, material, and fabrication we could achieve a different sensibility and a different way to say something in public that doesn’t rely on the language of landscape architecture.

McColl Park, where The Nest is located, is the highest elevation in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s where everything — trade, commerce — comes together. When I grew up there, Independence Square was a place where everybody met. The physicality of the space has an intensity, which was echoed in the place of art, buildings, and symbols on the ground. But I didn’t want to keep reinforcing the same thing. The Nest is a crossroads, but it’s also a metaphor for bringing things together. The installation is a tensegrity structure suspended over a pool of water and it comes from the idea that birds collect a variety of materials from different places to build a communal nest.

The Nest is an aerial installation that marks a crossing — the ground is only marked through water. It is ephemeral, animated with reflection, shadow, and light. We went to McColl Park one evening to celebrate the opening, all the representational statues and text on the ground seemed to disappear. The phenomenological aspects of the artwork levitating over the landscape won out.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Hood Design Studio

“We work at the intersection of crossings in terms of discipline, but also across time.”

Our community papel-picado banner workshop was centered around the theme of flight.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Hood Design Studio

As both landmark and metaphor, Migrations invites reflection on the intertwined journeys of species, cultures, and communities in constant motion.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Hood Design Studio

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

SARITA SCHREIBER, Associate + Art Practice Manager

The idea of crossing as an act of productive transgression is very important to the studio’s art practice. We like to blur the boundaries between art, landscape, and architecture, but it’s the temporal crossings: the layering of a site with its past history, its ecological context, that drive our landscape design and public art practice.

Much like the interwoven members of The Nest, the physicality of Migrations installation also evokes crossing. Located at the San Diego Airport, Migrations is made up of two abstracted bird heads — one is 40-feet tall and the other 20-feet tall. As in folklore, we use the metaphor of flight to talk about transgressing beyond present circumstance. The piece alludes in part to the US-Mexico border, drawing inspiration from the great bird migration flyaway and global mythologies where avian-human figure symbolize transformation, rebirth, and freedom.

Exterior public art at this scale defines place and creates memory. Standing bright red and yellow in graphic contrast to the new airport terminal, my hope is these sculptures serve as “provocations of place”, becoming a landmark over time. First-time visitors may find them unfamiliar and strange in their abstraction, but that’s what I love about public art, it forces people to find their own entry points, bringing their own sensitivities and readings to it based on its shape, title, and materials. The artwork becomes the crossroads for critical thought and interpretation.

There are also some very technical ways in which our latest installation relates to the theme of crossing. Migrations is composed of modular crosses of charred, shou sugi ban cedar dowels attached to the pinwheeling steel structure. They form and entropic linear composition, creating volume and energy within the birds. In the end, these bundles seem almost calligraphic.

We worked very closely with the fabricator, Ignition Arts, Tipping Structural, and the installer to maintain flexibility in the bundle connection design. We were beholden to three sets of requirements: structural spans and connections, constructability of 3-axis rotation in the shop, and the physical realities and tolerances of installing when you’re 40 feet in the air. Working with a repeated module counter to an ordered system is quite difficult, but by cultivating organic chaos we brought back the mess and humanized these large scale pieces of art.

 

Five kneeling figures emerge through granite walls within the outline of Gadsden’s Wharf storehouse.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Sahar Coston-Hardy

News

As part of The Kresge Foundation’s multi-million dollar investment in Detroit, Hood Design Studio will partner with the Marygrove Conservancy and develop a campus plan for the institution’s headquarters. 

Walter spoke with Elle Decor and shared insight into the studio’s current projects, including the transformation of Lincoln Center Plaza and Damrosch Park.

Read the review of African Ancestors Garden in Landscape Architecture Magazine. Landscape historian Thaisa Way writes, “The garden interrogates, exhumes, remembers, navigates, and, ultimately, knows.” 

Join Walter for “Cultural Storytelling Through Design” on November 4, hosted online by the New York Botanical Gardens. Register here.

Sarita Schreiber and fabricator Brian McCutcheon of Ignition Arts presented The Nest and Migrations at CODAsummit in Washington, DC. They discussed the challenges of modular design in public art practice. 

Summer 2025

Welcome to Under the Hood.

Let’s explore the creative ideas driving the studio

What’s a WALL—simple shelter or means to separate? For our summer dispatch Hood Design Studio’s Michael DeGregorio and Paul Peters reflect on the ways that a WALL might be built to evoke labor + history or unbuilt to restore equitable access.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

“Walls are typically static, but at Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park the tabby wall can change and transform — the environment will act on it over time.”

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park celebrates the heritage and success of the historic Lavilla neighborhood.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Toni Smailagic of CRE8JAX

WALL TO WALL

MICHAEL DEGREGORIO, Principal + Landscape Architect

I like walls. Obviously, they can be used to divide, but within landscape design they can create a structure and framework for open space. When I talk about walls, I’m talking about large, freestanding walls that are sizable and larger than a human—walls that are big enough to act as a canvas, walls that catch light and shadow, walls that provide shade.

My grandfather was the last of the DeGregorios to be a bricklayer. I come from five generations of Italian bricklayers, so I've been looking at walls with my father since I was a kid. I’m particularly fond of clinker bricks, which are dense, irregular, and very sculptural. The clay is overfired to produce imperfections. Because each module is different, you can see the tactility, craft, and labor that went into laying a wall.

At Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park in Jacksonville, Florida, there's a supergraphic wall that surrounds the lifted lawn. Each letter is made out of tabby, a kind of concrete made out of oyster shells and ash that’s prevalent in the southeast. While the wall spells out the words to the celebrated hymnal by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, the material references the ruins of the slave quarters at nearby Kingsley Plantation. 

We went to the plantation early on in the development of the park. On the backside of the property the remaining bright white walls of the slave quarters stand in a semi-circle. They're made of tabby and starting to degrade. At the foot of each wall you can see the oyster shells that have slumped off. When we arrived, the walls were shrouded in fog and blurring with the landscape. That was a really striking image for us and we translated it directly to the park.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

“We are often quick to be judgmental about walls, but we can flip the meaning and use them to create historical datums or thresholds.”

The reimagined Damrosch Park creates a more welcoming edge to the campus.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Brooklyn Digital Foundry

AFTER THE GARDEN

PAUL PETERS, Principal + Landscape Architect

The Hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, describes a walled landscape that keeps the wild and untamed from the cultivated. But that concept has been used to justify exclusion.

When Kevin Roche and landscape architect Dan Kiley designed the Oakland Museum of California in the 1960’s, it was meant as a set of public urban gardens but city officials, citing civil unrest and the activism of the Black Panthers, decided they needed a wall to keep unrest out. Our redesign of the Oakland Museum focused on breaking down that boundary to reconnect the museum with the city.

Similarly, Robert Moses’ urban renewal in New York City bulldozed blocks on the upper West Side and led to Lincoln Center—an elite podium separate from the rest of the city. While there was a metaphorical wall around the campus, there also is a literal wall on the west side. It is about 15 to18-feet tall and forms an infrastructural barrier for access. Our project at Damrosch Park takes down the wall and replaces it with a series of gardens and groves that brings people into the campus from the west and connects to Amsterdam Houses, a NYCHA housing project.

The design aims to remove an invisible social barrier through a series of human-scaled spaces to sit in the shade or read a book. Instead of reinforcing the boundary, we replaced the walls with a threshold.  

 

Hood Design Studio’s latest project, McColl Park + The Nest.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JonnyArchives

News

The New York Times’  Michael Kimmelman notes that HDS’ renovation of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center could “help heal a civic wound”.

In Untapped Journal, Walter Hood shares the story of the home where he grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and the lessons of care it taught him.

McColl Park opened last month in the heart of Charlotte, NC. HDS’ design and art installation brings the community together. “It builds a better society when we’re able to understand one another and celebrate one another, even though there’s differences between us,” Hood told the Charlotte Observer.

CBS News featured our new design for a memorial sculpture park honoring Sidney and Irène Dearing, the first Black family to own a home in the city of Piedmont, CA. They were driven out by racist mobs in 1924.

Spring 2025

Welcome to Under the Hood.

Let’s explore the creative ideas driving the studio.

For our first edition of this seasonal dispatch from Hood Design Studio we unpack the meaning of TREE. Walter Hood and Alma du Solier invite us to look at TREE with fresh eyes and see it as a gift, community builder, and keeper of memories.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

“Within West Oakland’s tree coverage you see people's desires, personalities, and commitment to maintain a tree. You get a sense of what’s valued.”

HOOD’s new West Oakland studio.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

MEMORY TREES  

ALMA DU SOLIER, Studio Director

The beautiful thing about trees is that we all connect with them in different ways—from our childhoods or our city of origin. Trees are living organisms and they hold a lot of memory. I grew up in Monterey, Mexico and my grandfather had a weird notion of planting trees: we had a pomegranate tree, a pecan tree, and a Washingtonia palm. The trees were not necessarily beautiful or amazing, they were just present and huge. As a child I had this kind of connection to them. If I close my eyes, I can visualize the palm’s trunk and how we would play with the fronds.

None of the trees belonged in that environment, they were completely alien. But this is the randomness of different trees living together. The same is true of the area of West Oakland where we have our office. The neighborhood is not devoid of trees; it's a hodgepodge of species that reflect how people have lived here over a long time. Here, tree care belongs with individual landowners, as opposed to other places where the public realm might be managed by an outside authority, like the city’s public works department.

Many streets in West Oakland are named after trees: Chestnut, Linden, Magnolia. Our studio is on the corner of 30th and Myrtle Streets, so we planted a dozen myrtles in the sidewalk strip.

When a community manages their own trees there’s a chance you'll end up with a lot of missing teeth in terms of tree coverage. And yet, I feel that it’s a more honest depiction of the community that we engage with—everybody's doing their own thing.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Adrienne Eberhardt

“In landscape, people sometimes forget about the thing and everything becomes nature. But we love things. We remember things.”

Visitors relax in the Broad’s olive grove.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Hood Design Studio

Olive tree planting in our new studio.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Hood Design Studio

TREES AS THINGS

WALTER HOOD, Founder + Creative Director

My thinking about trees never starts with an ecological view. I understand them as objects that are just part of the medium of landscape. Once one starts thinking about the ecological aspect of planting trees, you lose the power of trees as things. This idea came to me very early in my practice, particularly working in communities where you don't get many things. The studio’s first project was Courtland Creek Park in Oakland. We planted an allée of 150 purple leaf plum trees. Although the trees are located between the bay marshland and the urban fabric, I never thought of them in an ecological way—even when it stirred up critique. This was a strategy of obtaining 150 things for the community. Imagine 150 things spaced evenly along the street… and once a year they all bloom.

If you go into a devalued neighborhood and plant trees 50-feet on-center, those trees just seem to disappear. As designers, we can do things to get people to really see trees as objects: use a flowering tree or plant them close together. It’s less about being naturalistic and more about bringing value. That's where design comes in.

At The Broad Museum Plaza in Los Angeles, we created a grove of 100-year-old olive trees. They have character: they are your grandfather, your great-great grandfather. The thingness of these trees stayed with me.

We planted olive trees when we moved into our new office in West Oakland. In this devalued neighborhood it is rare to find objects that are old, and particularly old trees. Nothing lasts that long. To plant these 60-year old-trees is to create a temporal context where it feels like there's something here now, where before it was a kind of a fleeting environment.

The olive trees became part of our life—these new things. As we lived with them, a different thing happened with the body. Because this is not a young tree, this mature thing has a spatial presence, which changes your sociology. You stop, you look. You understand that objects being are not from around here. Like us, they are strangers to the neighborhood.

 

Walter’s latest book published by Monacelli.

PHOTOGRAPHY: The International African American Museum

NEWS  

Published by Monacelli, The African Ancestors Garden is now available. The book document’s the studio’s landscape design for the International African American Museum in Charleston. Order now. 

Join HOOD Principal Paul Peters, at the American Alliance of Museum’s annual meeting in Los Angeles on May 8 for Landscapes of Trust: Engaging Communities and Honoring Diverse Histories.

Walter Hood was named the 2025 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture. Stream his medalist lecture here.

On Brick and Wonder’s Working Together podcast, Walter Hood and Mark Robbins talk about a lifetime of work in the public realm. 

The Architect’s Newspaper featured our design for MacGregor Park, the 65-acre park located on the banks of Brays Bayou in Houston’s Third Ward.