Walter Hood awarded the Vincent Scully Prize

The National Building Museum awarded Walter Hood, as the 26th recipient of the Museum’s annual Vincent Scully Prize in a public celebration on Friday (October 4, 2024). Established in 1999, the Scully Prize recognizes excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. He joins esteemed past recipients, including Theaster Gates, Laurie Olin, Mabel O. Wilson, and Elizabeth Meyer. 

Best known for his work in the public realm and urban environments, Walter Hood has a storied career as a designer, artist, academic administrator, and educator. He creates ecologically sustainable spaces that connect with urban communities and help empower marginalized communities. Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio, a social art and design practice based in Oakland, California which he founded in 1992. The studio’s practice includes art and fabrication, design and landscape, and research urbanism. Responding to each place’s unique scale and context with an approach adaptive to the specifics of a space, Hood’s work seeks to uncover and strengthen layers of meaning present in all landscapes – ecological, cultural, contemporary and historic. Notable projects include the large-scale garden designs of the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, the Oakland Museum of California, the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Hood currently serves as chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning (LAEP). Among his numerous accolades, Hood received the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, both in 2019, the Architectural League’s President’s Medal in 2021 and the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Award for Design in 2023.

“Walter Hood’s Illustrious career embodies the affirmative spirit of Vincent Scully’s perspective; that of melding art, history, landscape, and urbanism,” said Aileen Fuchs, president and executive director of the National Building Museum. “He has forged a path for landscapes architects with provocative designs that have helped instigate social change”

The Vincent Scully Prize recipient is selected by a jury, including members Esther da Costa Meyer, Nancy Levinson, Stephen Luoni, Toshiko Mori, and led by chair Paul Goldberger. 

The Prize Jury remarks that, “Hood focuses particularly on urban public space, and unlike many of his peers in landscape design, he makes a point of working at both the scale of large, public projects such as the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and the intimate scale of community-based neighborhood projects. His recent work at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, has been particularly admired. We were mindful of Vincent Scully’s own history as a scholar who took pride in being an activist on social and political issues.”