Marcus Hanschen

We are sitting at a café in the Glenview district of Oakland and Walter Hood is looking out the window at Park Boulevard. It is the kind of street that Americans encounter daily -- a bland four-lane expanse of asphalt, gussied up at the edges by a few plum trees and a narrow median strip tended by neighborhood volunteers. "Park Boulevard is an awful road," he says. "It could be anywhere."

Between bites of the yogurt-and-granola parfait he is breakfasting on, Hood begins to imagine how Park Boulevard might have been designed with its own particular history in mind. The street was originally a logging road used to haul redwood trees from the grove at the top of the hill and Hood muses on the possibility (though not the feasibility) of lining the street with redwoods. It's a casual thought, not a serious proposal, but it goes to the heart of Hood's particular approach to making landscape. "I'm interested in cities and I'm interested in people," he explains. "I'm interested in the ground under cities and how it relates to the things that we build on top, and how those relationships might prompt you to do something in a very different way from town to town."

Hood, 47, is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at Berkeley and, as the principal of Hood Design, one of the field's hottest professionals, particularly since creating the landscape for the new de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Deborah McKoy, a Wurster-Hall colleague at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, describes him as "the rock star of urban design." He looks the part, with his dreadlocks pulled back in a loose ponytail, a diamond stud in his left ear, and a sinewy grace that makes him seem as if he is gliding rather than walking. Metropolis magazine has called him "one of landscape architecture's leading public intellectuals," while The New York Times describes him as the "Frederick Law Olmsted of [Oakland's] dispossessed neighborhoods."

Hood's aesthetic is more spare and modern than Olmsted's, and his designs celebrate urban life rather than offering respite from it. But the comparison to Olmsted remains apt. Like Olmsted, Hood has a gift for making beautiful places, and like Olmsted, he creates places that bridge social and economic gaps. In the past 150 years, the field of landscape architecture has ricocheted between aesthetic values and social ones. Hood's work celebrates human interaction and history, while managing to be uncommonly lovely. "In the tradition of Garrett Eckbo, who was his mentor, Walter fuses artistic brilliance with social responsibility," observes Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design. "And he's one of the few people in the world who does this successfully." Hood states his philosophy more simply: "You can be an advocate," he says, "but you can do beautiful things."

Today is Friday, the one day of Hood's extraordinarily overscheduled week when he gets to work in his studio. "Today I can listen to the muse," he says, tapping his chest with his long, elegant fingers. Such time is hard to find. He is also teaching two courses at Berkeley and another two at the University of Michigan, in addition to lecturing and exhibiting at the University of Texas. At the same time, he is working on close to a dozen commissions, including landscapes for the Autry National Center in Los Angeles' Griffith Park, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Key Beach Museum in South Florida, the redesigned entrance to the San Jose International Airport, four different public spaces in four long-neglected Oakland neighborhoods, and a new civic infrastructure for Francisco Street, one of the oldest and wealthiest streets in San Francisco.

When he wearies of the constant demands on his time, Hood sometimes says he'd like to go back to being unknown, but he enjoys having reached a point where he can make the work he wants to make, and where he is celebrated, not for being one of the few African Americans in the profession, but for having a singular vision. "I don't want to be at the table based on what I look like," he says. "I want to be at the table based on what my ideas are."

Improvisation is the word Hood often uses to describe his approach to design. People in marginal circumstances have to make do with what they have, and so they appropriate public spaces designed for other things and improvise within them. The idea of improvising within a structure, the way a jazz musician does, appeals to Hood's mix of artistic invention and intellectual intensity. "It's about working within a tradition, but finding your own place within it, and therefore you extend the conversation," he explains.

Improvisation requires that a designer understand the community of people he's designing for, and design for the way they actually use a space, rather than the way he thinks they should use it. Every park bench with a bar down the middle so the homeless can't sleep there, every cookie-cutter tot lot, generic basketball court, or "no skateboarding" sign demands that the users of that landscape conform to certain preconceived ideas. "Improvisation begins to argue that we're not the same," Hood says. In his 1993 book, Jazz and Blues Landscapes, Hood re-conceived an existing pocket park in West Oakland, designing it for 16 imaginary characters, including an inventor, a single mother, and a musician. The single mother's park has a small constellation of trees and plenty of open vistas, so that mom can keep an eye on her children. In the cook's park, people can gather on the lawn or under a shelter to eat the ribs barbecued on the park's own grill.

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