Under the Hood — HOOD DESIGN STUDIO

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

**“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.

Summer 2025

“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.”

WALL TO WALL

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

AFTER THE GARDEN

News

Spring 2025

“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.”

MEMORY TREES

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

TREES AS THINGS

NEWS

HOOD DESIGN STUDIO

3001 san pablo avenue, Oakland CA 94608

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