Walter hood grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a working-class but upwardly-mobile family. His father was a career serviceman. Hood started his childhood in subsidized housing and in junior high was bused from the inner city to the suburbs. By high school, his family had moved to their own home in the suburbs, and he was being bused back into the city. The contrast between these two worlds, urban and suburban, helped shape his attitudes about equity and public space.

"I can remember when I was in seventh grade - well, how come I never saw a split-level house until then?" he says. "I didn't even know they existed, that there were other ways to live." Being a black kid in the suburbs was often difficult, but Hood credits the experience with giving him a sense of possibility, an awareness that the world was much bigger than he had assumed.

His earliest memories are of drawing, and he continues to be a nearly constant doodler, his pen etching shapes on the closest page while he talks. After working on a commission until six or seven in the evening, he'll spend another four hours painting landscapes. "I was always trying to figure things out graphically, by drawing," Hood says of his childhood. "And that led me to drafting in high school, and then architecture, engineering." In 1976, he went to North Carolina A&T, an all-black land-grant college. He was the first person in his family to pursue higher education, and began with a major in architecture.

Then he attended a lecture on landscape archi-tecture. "It seemed that everything I wanted to do was encapsulated by these guys who had come to talk about landscape architecture," he recalls. "The drawing was much more free. There was this kind of multidimensional aspect to dealing with people, the physical, the natural." Hood joined the landscape architecture program - the first at a historically black college - founded by Charles Fountain.

After getting his degree, Hood worked for the National Park Service and then joined a private firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But the work wasn't stimulating to him. Having had a predominantly technical education, he found himself craving another kind of intellectual experience. "I needed to train my mind," Hood says. In 1985, to the consternation of his family, who failed to understand why he would give up a well-paying job and return to the life of a student, he applied to Berkeley.

That was when Berkeley landscape architecture Professor Randolph Hester got a call from his old friend Charles Fountain. "It was the only time Dr. Fountain ever said to me, ïYou just have to admit this guy,'" Hester says now. He found Hood to be just as special as Fountain had promised. "He worked twice as hard as anybody else. He had more raw talent than most people," he says. "And he was able to develop his vision."

Hood became a research assistant for Garrett Eckbo, the father of modern landscape architecture, and then went to work for Hester, a fellow North Carolinian who shares his passion for socially conscious design. After five years he had earned two master's degrees, in architecture and in landscape architecture, and had been invited to apply for a faculty position. He has now been on the faculty for 16 years. Ivan Valin, the TA for Hood's first-year studio class, says, "He demands rigor from the beginning of a design, rigor with the idea."

It's another Friday morning, just before lunch, and Walter Hood stands in a triangular park that runs from a parking lot under the I-580 freeway to the edge of the Grand Lake shopping district in Oakland.

"I like watching the cars go by," Hood remarks, his eyes fixed on the cars sliding along the concrete overpass. "They go so fast."

While most landscape architects view freeways as eyesores to be screened out by thoughtful plantings, Hood has an unconventional affection for the realities of city life. "I'm not making antidotes to the city," he explains. People have sometimes told him that he doesn't use enough plants in his work, a statement he dismisses with a sigh. "At one time I thought that constituted landscape - the plants, how you put the plants together," he says. Hood feels that the most important aspect of design is finding a formal structure for the landscape, which he likens to the bones of the body. "There has to be this very strong set of bones," he says. "Because the things that you make might go away, but the bones will not."

	page 2	|	5