Boston Flora

Tag: Walter Hood

  • Tuesday, November 4, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm Eastern – Walter Hood: Cultural Storytelling Through Design, Online

    MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant-winner Walter Hood creates green spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of residents while also honoring communal histories. As founder and creative director of Oakland-based firm, Hood Design Studio, he has transformed a variety of areas—from the redesign of traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods to large-scale commemorative landscapes that reflect his firm’s interest in the role of sculpture in public space.

    As the third lecture in the New York Botanical Garden’s 27th Annual Landscape Design Portfolios Lecture Series, Hood will share projects that approach design through the lens of cultural storytelling and community engagement, including the highly-praised International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina—an impactful landscape that addresses memory, tragedy, and culture while paying homage to the local community and the African diaspora at large. Hood will also share insights into his firm’s upcoming redesign of the landscape surrounding Lincoln Center and Damrosch Park in NYC. This project aims to address the urban barrier created by the center’s construction in the 1960s—a project that displaced much of the San Juan Hill neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. Register for all three talks at www.nybg.org.

  • Thursday, July 17, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern – The African Ancestors Garden, Online

    Designed to honor the lives and legacies of the African diaspora, the African Ancestors Garden at the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, integrates cultural symbolism, native plants, and evocative spatial forms. This Garden Conservancy talk on July 17 by Walter Hood examines the creative process behind this living memorial, highlighting how history and memory are embedded within the design to foster reflection, healing, and connection. Through its layered narratives and immersive experience, the garden creates a contemplative space that bridges past and present while inspiring dialogue about identity, heritage, and community.

    WALTER J. HOOD, a multidisciplinary designer from Charlotte, NC, is globally recognized for his contributions in art, landscape architecture, urbanism, and research. Founding Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA, in 1992, he now leads as its creative director. His passion for landscape and urbanism emerges from its broad, democratic scope, allowing experiences beyond architectural constraints. Infusing African American cultural arts into his philosophy, he has established a unique voice, reshaping spaces to reflect contemporary needs without erasing their history. A professor at UC Berkeley and former Harvard educator, Walter penned Black Landscapes Matter and has received accolades such as the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2021 Architectural League’s President’s Medal award, and the 2024 Vincent Scully Prize.

    Note: You will receive the webinar link directly from Zoom. Participants in this webinar have the option to purchase a copy of the book, The African Ancestors Garden: History and Memory at the International African American Museum, receive complimentary admission to the webinar. Price ($50 Conservancy members, $60 nonmembers) includes book, free shipping, and webinar admission. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/events/the-african-ancestors-garden-with-walter-hood-book-webinar Or you may choose to register for the webinar alone. If you’d like to purchase webinar admission only, please click here.

  • #Garden Preservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy

    For more than 30 years, the Garden Conservancy has been championing gardens and broadening the preservation narrative. This strategic, multidisciplinary approach to preserving gardens weaves together the practical and the intangible. The Conservancy facilitates on-the-ground restoration of historic gardens and also documents gardens, capturing their history and spirit through film, photography, interviews, and archives filled with plans and maps. It holds conservation easements that permanently protect “conservation values”—the most significant features of gardens, such as their plant collections, design, hardscape, and/or vistas. It advocates for gardens at risk, taking a public stand to raise awareness and encourage action. And, as preservation is not possible without education, it engages the community and provides professional development to garden leaders, board members, and staff, and provide mentorship and resources as well.

    #GardenPreservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy, published in June 2021, is an oversize, 64-page volume containing essays by experts in the field as well as short summaries of more than 100 preservation projects of the Garden Conservancy since 1989. Illustrated by Dana Scott Westring. Click here to view an animated PDF of the whole book. 

    Seven essays from leading voices in preservation, landscape architecture, garden history, conservation, and documentation—and one interview—present a range of perspectives on garden preservation:

    A User’s Guide to Preservation: One Contemporary Designer’s Perspective on History, by Thomas Woltz

    Preserving Traces and Remnants of a Gardening Past, by Brent Leggs and Lawana Holland-Moore

    I am here. by Shaun Spencer-Hester

    Interview with the Stewards of Rocky Hills, Barbara and Rick Romeo

    The Importance of Preserving Gardens, by Walter Hood

    An Accidental Preservationist, by Judith B. Tankard

    Preserving Gardens that Spring from the Soul, by Lucinda Brockway

    Landscape and Memory at Sylvester Manor, by Donnamarie Barnes

    The essays are followed by short profiles of more than 100 of the Garden Conservancy’s preservation projects and partners since 1989.

    Both the essays and profiles reveal the garden as a cultural bridge, a site for scientific study and ecological conservation, a path to equity and social justice, a catalyst for design innovation, and a stimulus for spiritual expansion.

    Order a copy of #GardenPreservation here.

  • Now Through March 15 – Good Books, Good Friends Book Auction

    Now Through March 15 – Good Books, Good Friends Book Auction

    Bidding Now Open for The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) Good Books, Good Friends Silent Auction. The collection includes more than 70 monographs and books by landscape architects, architects, photographers, and allied practitioners with inscriptions, autographs, sketches, watercolors, collages and other additions that make them unique collectors’ items. Participants include Marion Brenner, Jeanne Gang, Walter Hood, Laurie Olin, Kate Orff, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Peter Walker, and dozens of others. There are also rare works by Lawrence Halprin, Elizabeth deForest, Thomas Church, A.E. Bye, James Rose, and more. Bid Now through March 15, 2021. Proceeds benefit TCLF’s education and advocacy initiatives. 

  • Thursday, November 12, 7:00 pm – Walter Hood

    Walter Hood is an artist, designer, and educator based in Oakland, California. His studio, Hood Design, has worked on landscape, architectural, urban design, and art installation projects since 1992, including the award-winning gardens at the new De Young Museum in San Francisco. Splash Pad Park in Oakland and his work with residents of the Hill District in Pittsburgh are considered transformative landscapes. His design for the University of Buffalo’s Solar Strand incorporates 5,000 solar panels into a large public space. Hood received the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape in 2009. He will speak at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Thursday, November 12 beginning at 7 pm in Calderwood Hall. Lectures include Museum admission and require a ticket. Tickets can be reserved online at www.gardnermuseum.org, in person at the door, or by phone: 617-278-5156. Adults $15, seniors $12, students $5, free for Museum members.