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.