Walter Hood wins the 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture

Hood Design Studio's founder Walter Hood has been named the winner of the 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture by the University of Virginia.

The prize has been given annually since 1966 in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in recognition of those who best exemplify the university’s founder in their pursuits of Architecture, Law, and Citizen Leadership. In being named the winner, Hood joins fellow architects like Frank Gehry, Alvar Aalto, and Leon Krier in winning the honor, which last year saw fellow headline landscape practitioner Kate Orff selected.

"[My] interest 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. [Our] research includes archival and oral histories, physical, environmental, and social patterns and practices, to uncover familiar and untold stories," Hood said in a press release about his approach and work through his 33-year-old Oakland-based studio. 

"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," he continued.

The new accolade adds to Hood's list of other honors that includes a past MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellowship and a Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (both 2019) and the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award.

Hood is currently the Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and Urban Design at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. He and his fellow 2025 medalists will be presented during a special ceremony held on April 13th from the historic UVA Rotunda in Charlottesville. 

Hood was also recently honored with the 2024 Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum. Our 2021 feature conversation with the architect about his journey through the field and the notion of Blackness in design can be found here.