Walter Hood Wins 2024 Vincent Scully Prize

Oakland Museum of California - Photo Credit Caitlin Atkinson.jpg

Oakland Museum of California, with gardens renovated by Hood Design Studio. Photo © Caitlin Atkinson

Architects & Firms

Artist, educator, and landscape designer Walter Hood has been named as recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2024 Vincent Scully Prize, an annual honor that has recognized “excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design” since 1999.

Walter Hood. Photo © Adrienne Eberhardt

North Carolina–born Hood, creative director of Oakland, California–based social art and design practice Hood Design Studio and current chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, joins past Scully Prize awardees including Phyllis Lambert, Robert A.M. Stern, Mabel O. Wilson, and 2023 laureate Theaster Gates. Previous recipients working in the realm of landscape architecture and design include Laurie Olin and Elizabeth K. Meyer.

“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, in a statement. “He has forged a path for landscape architects with provocative designs that have helped instigate social change.”

International African American Museum, Charleston, South Carolina. Photo © Esto/Sahar Coston-Hardy

Panorama Park, San Francisco. Photo © Steven J. Magner

Projects led by Hood Design Studio, which Hood established in 1992, that have previously been featured in RECORD include a pair of hilltop parks at Yerba Buena Island in the San Francisco Bay (2024); the grounds and gardens of the Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Moody Nolan–designed International African American Museum (2023) at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina; the landscape surrounding the Los Angeles River–spanning Taylor Yard Bridge (2022), designed by SPF:architects; and the renovated gardens, originally designed by Dan Kiley and Geraldine Knight Scott, at the Oakland Museum of California (2021). Other notable projects include the newly opened Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park in Jacksonville, Florida.

“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,” wrote the award jury in its citation. “We were mindful of Vincent Scully’s own history as a scholar who took pride in being an activist on social and political issues.”

This year’s Scully Prize jury included Esther da Costa Meyer, Nancy Levinson, Stephen Luoni, Toshiko Mori, and chair Paul Goldberger, the 2012 laureate who will present Hood with the prize during a public ceremony held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on October 4. The event will feature remarks by Hood and a conversation with the jury members, followed by a reception.

Previous awards and accolades received by Hood include the Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award (2017), the MacArthur Fellowship (2019), the Architectural League of New York’s President’s Medal (2021), and the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Award for Design (2023).

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Matt Hickman is Senior News/Digital Editor at Architectural Record. Previously, he served as Senior Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and has over a decade of experience as a freelance writer and editor specializing in historic preservation, public space, and the intersection of the natural world and built environment. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Matt holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from The New School.