Walter J. Hood is the 2025 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture

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(Photo credit: Adrienne Eberhardt, courtesy of Hood Design Studio)

Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio, Walter J. Hood, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals – sponsored jointly by the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello – are awarded each year to recognize the achievements of those who embrace endeavors in which Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. president and founder of the University of Virginia – excelled and held in high regard.  The architecture medal and its counterparts in law, citizen leadership, and global innovation are UVA’s highest external honors.

Hood joins a distinguished list of past recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, Zaha Hadid, Francis Kéré, Andrew Freear, and Kate Orff. 

“It is an honor to recognize Walter Hood’s remarkable contributions to our nation’s landscapes and urban spaces,” said UVA School of Architecture’s Dean Malo A. Hutson. “Throughout his career he has chosen to focus on the public sphere, while embracing a highly collaborative and deeply thoughtful design process. By doing so, his work brings people together in the making of spaces—illuminating our collective histories and creating new ways of thinking about, looking at, and experiencing our world.”

Hood will give a public talk to mark the occasion on April 11 at 3:30 p.m. in Old Cabell Hall’s auditorium. This event is free and open to all. 

The lecture is presented with Hood Design Studio's exhibition Native(s) in the Campbell Hall Elmaleh Gallery on display February 3 - April 13. 

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Globally recognized as a pre-eminent multidisciplinary designer, best known for his work in the public realm and urban environments, Hood founded the award-winning cultural practice Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, in 1992. Over three decades later, he now leads the studio as its creative director executing a wide range of projects from large-scale landscapes and urban masterplans to neighborhood-scaled design interventions and site-specific public artworks. For each project, Hood takes an approach that responds to context, using design to uncover the complex layers of ecological, cultural and material meaning within a place. His passion for landscape and urbanism emerges from its broad, democratic scope, allowing experiences beyond architectural constraints.

“[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,” said this year’s medalist Walter J. Hood. “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.”

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(L) Hood Design Studio designed the IAAM’s African Ancestors Memorial Garden drawing from the local landscape of the Carolina Lowcountry and the diverse landscapes of the African Diaspora. (R): At the eastern boundary of the site’s Gadsden’s Wharf, a water feature reveals full-scale human figures carved out of concrete and oystershell pavers comprising a ground depicting the 1787 schematic drawing of the slave ship Brookes that portrays the inhumane living conditions that enslaved Africans endured during the Middle Passage. (Photo credit: Esto Images - Sahar Coston Hardy, courtesy of Hood Design Studio)

Select award-winning projects of Hood Design Studio have included the International African American Museum (IAAM), the Memphis Crosstown Concourse, and Oakland’s Waterfront and Splash Pad Park.  The IAAM, which received The Architect’s Newspaper’s Project of the Year Award in 2023 and was named to TIME Magazine’s prestigious list of the ‘World’s Greatest Places of 2024,’ is sited at the port of arrival for nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to North America at Gadsden’s Wharf on Charleston, South Carolina’s Cooper River. In 2016, seven years prior to the project opening, Hood Design Studio began a collaborative journey to design the museum’s African Ancestors Memorial Garden, bringing together a diverse group of artists, academics, historians, activists, architects, and civic leaders.

The collaborative process led to Hood Design Studio’s landscape strategy which takes cues from the tradition of ‘hush harbors’—landscapes where enslaved Africans would gather, often in secret and outside the view of slave owners, to freely assemble, share stories, and keep traditions from their homeland alive. Drawing from the local landscape of the Carolina Lowcountry and the diverse landscapes of the African Diaspora, the memorial garden covers 2.5 acres and includes a sweet grass field, palm grove, and water feature, that together with the building honor the hallowed ground and collective memory of the site and the people who occupied it. 

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In the recently published book, The African Ancestors Garden: History and Memory at the International African American Museum (The Monacelli Press, 2024), renowned architect and scholar Mabel O. Wilson wrote, “Walter Hood’s landscape for Charleston’s International African American Museum creates a threshold between land and sea, between past and future…Through the sonic textures of seagrass in the wind, the fragrance of varietal flowers, and the turn of the seasons, the [African Ancestors Memorial Garden] cultivates memories of the diverse cultural contributions of food, music, dance, art, and knowledge that peoples of African descent made to the Lowcountry region and across the Americas… The landscape functions as a rich commemorative counterpoint to the exhibition narratives unfolding in the museum’s galleries above and converses with the architecture to further encourage contemplation and memory.”

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Born into a military family in Charlotte, North Carolina, Hood spent his early years in the 1960s abroad, steeped in global cultures—an experience that shaped his perception of society and his place in it. He began his academic journey at North Carolina A&T State University in architectural engineering and then transitioned to their pioneering landscape architecture program, graduating first in its class in 1981. Further graduate studies in architecture and landscape architecture led him to the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Hood is currently Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and Urban Design at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. He co-edited the acclaimed title Black Landscapes Matter (UVA Press, 2020), which brings together notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. The book received the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize and an American Society of Landscape Architects Award, both in 2021, and was described as “…a timely revelation of the sometimes painful truths about places across the United States where injustices have been embedded, confronting them in a way that promotes restorative action toward a more just terrain.”

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(Top L and R) Native(s) on display at the 2023 Venice Biennale is an exhibition that depicts the threatened Black cultural landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Lowcountry. Descendent of its adjacent plantation landscape, the 1,000-acre rural agricultural settlement of Phillips is today a modest residential community along the historic Route 1. The landscape beyond its small area of cultivated land is called the ‘overgrown,’ rife with native flora such as pine, oak, and palm. (Photo credit: Clelia Cadamuro, courtesy of Hood Design Studio) / (Bottom) Native(s) exhibition on display at the UVA School of Architecture's Elmaleh Gallery. (Photo credit: Tom Daly)

Hood’s contributions to the built environment have been recognized extensively—his accolades include being named a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellow (2019), a Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize recipient (2019), an Architectural League President’s Medalist (2021), the Innovator in Design Awardee by Wall Street Journal Magazine (2023) and a Vincent Scully Prize recipient (2024). His work has also been widely exhibited including at the Venice Biennale, the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Most recently, in 2024, Hood has his first painting exhibition titled “Arc of Life/Ark of Bones” on display at The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture is one of three medals to be presented. This year’s Medal in Law goes to Edwin S. Kneedler, who has served as a U.S. deputy solicitor general for more than three decades. The Medal in Citizen Leadership will be awarded to Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and founding executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. This year’s medal winners will be celebrated at luncheon in the Dome Room of UVA’s Rotunda, marking the 282nd anniversary of Jefferson’s birth in 1743.

Walter J. Hood Public Talk - Event Details

Hood Design Studio's Native(s) - Exhibition Details

Founders Day - Event Details

THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION MEDALISTS IN ARCHITECTURE

1966 MIES VAN DER ROHE  
1967 ALVAR AALTO
1968 MARCEL BREUER
1969 JOHN ELY BURCHARD
1970 KENZO TANGE
1971 JOSE LUIS SERT
1972 LEWIS MUMFORD
1973 JEAN LABATUT
1974 FREI OTTO
1975 SIR NIKOLAUS PEVSNER
1976 I.M. PEI
1977 ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE
1978 PHILIP JOHNSON
1979 LAWRENCE HALPRIN
1980 HUGH A. STUBBINS
1981 EDWARD LARRABEE BARNES
1982 VINCENT SCULLY
1983 ROBERT VENTURI
1984 H.H. THE AGA KHAN
1985 LEON KRIER
1986 JAMES STIRLING
1987 ROMALDO GIURGOLA
1988 DAN KILEY
1989 PAUL MELLON
1990 FUMIHIKO MAKI
1991 JOHN V. LINDSAY
1992 ALDO ROSSI
1993 ANDRES M. DUANY & ELIZABETH PLATER-ZYBERK
1994 FRANK O. GEHRY
1995 IAN L. MCHARG
1996 JANE JACOBS
1997 JAIME LERNER
1998 JAQUELIN T. ROBERTSON
1999 LORD RICHARD ROGERS
2000 DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
2001 GLENN MURCUTT
2002 JAMES TURRELL
2003 TOD WILLIAMS & BILLIE TSIEN
2004 PETER WALKER
2005 SHIGERU BAN
2006 PETER ZUMTHOR
2007 ZAHA HADID
2008 GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND
2009 ROBERT IRWIN
2010 EDWARD O. WILSON
2011 MAYA LIN
2012 RAFAEL MONEO
2013 LAURIE OLIN
2014 TOYO ITO
2015 HERMAN HERTZBERGER
2016 CECIL BALMOND
2017 YVONNE FARRELL & SHELLEY MCNAMARA
2018 SIR DAVID ADJAYE
2019 KAZUYO SEJIMA & RYUE NISHIZAWA
2020 MARION WEISS & MICHAEL MANFREDI
2021 DIÉBÉDO FRANCIS KÉRÉ
2022 KENNETH FRAMPTON
2023 ANDREW FREEAR & RURAL STUDIO
2024 KATE ORFF
2025 WALTER J. HOOD

MEDIA CONTACT:

University of Virginia School of Architecture, Sneha Patel, snehapatel@virginia.edu