Walter Hood and Maria Villalobos: Architecture and Urbanism (Illinois Tech + Chicago Humanities)

Awarded 2023 Project of the Year (Architect’s Newspaper) for the International African American Museum, Walter Hood focuses his design approach on art, landscape, and urbanism. In 2009, Hood received the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design. In addition to his mastery of architecture and landscape, Hood received his Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where he studied the role of sculpture in urban settings. The Hood Design Studio was founded in Oakland, California, in 1992. The studio strengthens endemic patterns and practices-ecological and cultural, contemporary and historical, and those that remain unseen or unrecognized. Hood believes urban spaces and their objects act as public sculptures, creating new apertures to see the emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies around us.
Walter Hood
Walter Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the 2021 recipient of the Architectural League’s President’s Medal award.
Maria Villalobos
Maria Villalobos Hernandez is Associate Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Director of the Master on Landscape Architecture and Urbanism. In 2017, she won the first prize in the Venezuelan Architecture Biennial for the Rehabilitation of the Botanical Garden of Maracaibo. It was the first time that a Landscape Architecture entry and woman received this award. Villalobos also holds a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she received the Annual Award for Excellence in Housing Design in 2004. From 2005 to 2009, Villalobos worked for the recovery of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 at the New York Department of City Planning. She joined Arup NYC to develop world-class public projects in New York, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro the following years. As Co-Founding Artist Creator at Botanical City, Villalobos calls attention to preserving endangered cultural landscapes and performative research methods where practice and research co-occur to test the enduring power of perseverance, generosity, and determination. In 2020, the Villalobos joined the Lincoln Yards Advisory Council. The same year, Villalobos became a core member of Dark Matter University to advocate for anti-racist design education and practice models. In 2021, Villalobos joined the inaugural Committee on Design for the Department of City Planning in Chicago.

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Appreciated the sincerity here. Thank you ID & Walter Hood. Lovely video..