Walter Hood recognized with 2024 Vincent Scully Prize

American landscape architect Walter Hood has joined ranks with some of his profession's most well-recognized names after being honored today with the National Building Museum’s prestigious Vincent Scully Prize for 2024.

Hood, who serves currently as Chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning (LAEP), was recognized for his capacity to instigate social change through teaching and a 32-year-old revolutionary practice. 

His 2024 Jury citation states: “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.”

Hood follows Theaster Gates, Dolores Hayden, and Mabel O. Wilson as the four most recent Vincent Scully Prize recipients. The prize was established in honor of the late Yale professor in 1999. Other past recipients include Jane Jacobs, Inga Saffron, and Paul Goldberger. 

The 2024 contest was chaired by Goldberger, with help from Esther da Costa Meyer, Nancy Levinson, Stephen Luoni, and Toshiko Mori. A special ceremony will be held in Hood's honor on October 4th in Washington. 

His reflections concerning his pathway in architecture from a 2021 feature interview with Archinect can be read here.