“Recent Work” presentation by Walter Hood, creative director, Hood Design, Oakland, CA; Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.

Hood is a 2017 Urban Edge Award recipient in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Time and Place

Time: 12:30 pm – 12:45 pm
*A 15 minute “TED Talk” like presentation
12:45 pm – 1:00 pm
Q&A w/ Walter Hood
Location: 201 East Pittsburgh Avenue #301, Milwaukee, WI 53204

After Presentation is Urban Edge Award Final Review/Symposium

Bio

Hood is an artist, designer, and educator. He regularly exhibits and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally, while his studio engages in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research. He currently serves at the Goldman Sachs Design Fellow for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, assisting the museum staff in reconceptualizing its public spaces. Other recent honors include the AIA Award for Collaborative Achievement and a USA Character Approved Honor by NBC Universal. In 2010, he received the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design. He is a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His work was recently featured in Art Institute of Chicago’s “Learning Modern” exhibition, and was featured prominently in the February 2010 issue of “Art in America.” He was a selected winner for the Venice Biennale and exhibited two projects: a green street and plaza for Center Street in Berkeley, California, and the Greenprint, an urban landscape vision for the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hood Design is a cultural practice committed to creating environments in which people live work and play. The studio practice engages urban landscape where a collective density of inhabitants share physical, social, political and economic resources. This multidimensional context is the setting for the development of powerful sculpted expressions that explore site specific social and environmental processes. Landscapes and built elements emerge as improvised acts, familiar yet reshaped into something new.

Lecture Summary

Hood is committed to the development of environments which reflect their place and time specifically through how people inhabit various geographies. Hood’s interest is in the re-construction of urban landscapes seeks to build palimpsest by developing new elements, spatial forms and objects which validate their existing familiar context. The Studio utilizes ‘research’ in lieu of standardized analytical practices. Project research includes archival and oral histories, physical, environmental and social patterns and practices, to uncover familiar and untold stories. These practices are layered together through an idiosyncratic improvisational design process that builds on architecture and urbanism’s rich tradition which yields familiar, yet new spaces, forms and elements. They assimilate the past and look forward into the future.

The Urban Edge Workshop is part of a series of events of SARUP’s prestigious Urban Edge Award 2017 supported by the Wisconsin Preservation Fund and the law firm of Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren to recognize excellence in urban design and the ability of individuals to create major, positive change within the public realm.

Need Parking?

Please checkout Visiting the UW-Milwaukee Campus for transit and non–motorized options and parking.

Need Directions?

Get directions to The School of Architecture and Urban Planning building at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is located at 2131 East Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Questions, comments?

All lectures are free and open to the public.
Additional information about the lectures and exhibitions can be found by contacting the main reception at (414) 229-4014, and by emailing any inquiries to Assistant Professor Nikole Bouchard.