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Weiss/Manfredi, Hood Design Studio, and Moody Nolan to design new Amsterdam Avenue enhancements at Lincoln Center

2024-03-04T16:32:00-05:00

The new Amsterdam Avenue face of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will be designed by a team that includes Weiss/Manfredi, Hood Design Studio, and Moody Nolan, the beloved New York City cultural institution announced Monday.

The revitalization plan entails first a radical overhaul of Damrosch Park, which will be transformed into a dynamic new outdoor area for artistic performance and public gatherings. All three firms will impart their extensive experience in public realm designs that has recently included work on the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina and master plan of the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, respectively.

East side of Amsterdam Avenue, north of 62nd Street. Photo by Lawrence Sumulong

The design will take shape in response to a participatory planning process that drew the opinions of over 3,400 New Yorkers and surviving former residents of San Juan Hill, the neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the 14-y...

Trahan Architects unveils U.S. pavilion design for Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai

2024-02-08T15:06:00-05:00

Trahan Architects has unveiled its USA Pavilion design for World Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan. The county’s official entry will play host to a slate of exhibitions designed to showcase American scientific exploration and entrepreneurship and will be completed by an official project team that includes HOOD Design, Dot Dash, and several other specialty studios.

Chicago's former Mayor and the current U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, says it will stand as "an embodiment of American spirit." Organizers are expecting approximately 30 million visitors.

Image: © Trahan Architects

Visitors will pass through a ringed wall that surrounds the Expo before entering the pavilion, which is separated into two wings that are connected via a suspended cubic form serving as a skybridge.

Image: © Trahan Architects

Exterior LED screens installed on its facade will broadcast scenes of America’s urban and natural landscapes. The project reuses steel, HVAC systems, and tensile fabric used in structures o...

Walter Hood prepares to lead UC Berkeley's landscape department

2023-08-24T11:37:00-04:00

Professor Walter Hood is set to become chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning (LAEP) for a two-year term beginning this fall. Berkeley describes Hood as “one of the pre-eminent American landscape designers working today,” whose projects “combine architectural and public art approaches with a concern for ecological sustainability.”

As our 2021 interview explored, Hood's education began at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design (CED), where he obtained both his Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture in 1989, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Joining CED's faculty in 1993, Hood has previously held the position of LAEP department chair, serving one term, and was honored with the Woo Chair for Design Excellence from 2012 to 2022.

Archinect Feature: Othering Blackness in Design: Reflections with Walter Hood

Meanwhile, Hood's literary contributions include authoring Urban Diar...

Take a look inside the new International African American Museum ahead of its opening

2023-06-05T17:41:00-04:00

One of the most anticipated projects of the summer is ready to make its official public debut later this month as the finishing touches are being put in place for the new Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed-designed International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sited along the city’s historic harbor that was, in its heyday, the “ground zero” of the slave trade in the southern United States, the museum seeks to educate visitors using a series of nine thematic galleries and the “power of place” present in its location at Gadsden’s Wharf.

The project is the culmination of over two decades of planning, advocacy, and design consultations between both firms, varied stakeholders, historians, politicians, and residents whose collaborations, in the end, beget what ought to become a transformative testament to the power of storytelling for Americans of every background.

Credit: © Sahar Coston-Hardy/Esto. All rights res...

HKS and Hood Design Studio’s CMNTY Culture development set for a 2024 groundbreaking in Hollywood

2022-12-06T13:54:00-05:00

An updated version of HKS and Hood Design Studio’s musically-inspired CMNTY Culture campus in Hollywood has been shared after the results of an initial study for the project were published by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning recently.

Urbanize LA has details on the promising development, which, when completed, will be one of the largest Black-owned enterprises in the city.

Image: HKS

Construction on the scheme, which is located on a four-parcel site at 6767 Sunset Boulevard, is now expected to begin in 2024 and wrap up by 2027. In total, the campus will include some 430,000 square feet of office space, a 50,000-square-foot production facility, a 500-seat performance venue, a 10,000-square-foot artists' hospitality area, and a six-story underground parking structure.

Image: HKS

The shared podium will be beset by landscaped terraces designed by Walter Hood's team and bookended by two offset volumes totaling 12 and 14 stories in height and wrapped in an LED screen facade.

Im...

SPF:a's new Obama Sports Complex is inaugurated in Los Angeles

2022-06-29T17:24:00-04:00

It’s opening day for SPF:architects’ new Michelle and Barack Obama Sports Complex in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills neighborhood. The new development replaces the old 29-acre Rancho Cienega Sports Complex and was developed in conjunction with Buro Happold and Hood Design Studio.

The scheme critically includes what is being labeled as one of the city’s first Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings — the all-new basketball wing of the larger, 40,000-square-foot facility — and is landscaped in a grid to evince five distinct ecologies: high desert, canyon, coastal, chaparral, and medicinal.

Hood’s drought-tolerant landscape design is also said to be inspired by the early-20th-century abstract painters like George Braque and Fernand Leger. The upgraded facility it surrounds is an amalgam of pre-engineered metal buildings (PEMB) deliberately selected to reduce costs and the environmental impacts of materials used in the project, which came together at the start of 2015 thanks to s...

HKS will transform a slice of Sunset Boulevard into a hub for Hollywood creativity

2022-03-22T13:35:00-04:00

A popular corner of Hollywood may soon be getting a lot busier thanks to a proposal for a new Grammy-worthy creative campus located at the crossroads of the entertainment industry’s two most important arteries.

Tentatively named the CMNTY Culture Campus, the proposed 500,000-square-foot design from HKS for Record Plant founder Phillip Lawrence and celebrity business mogul Thomas St. John will serve as the former’s “love letter” to the city, offering itself as a nexus of differing spaces reserved for users working across every area of the industry’s creative machine.

Image: CMNTY Culture/HKS

Hood Design Studio will collaborate with HKS for the landscape design on the two-acre site located directly across from Hollywood High School at Highland Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. The development is just a few short blocks removed from Netflix’s corporate headquarters and the site of MAD’s proposed Star office tower, which will be completed in 2026.

Once approved, the Campus will become one of...

Walter Hood, a 'contemporary prophet of landscape and public space,' is awarded the Architectural League 2021 President's Medal

2021-08-04T09:00:00-04:00

There is much to reflect on when thinking of Walter Hood's illustrious career. Hood started his design practice in 1992 after he graduated from UC Berkley where he received his Master's in Landscape Architecture. Since then, his commitment to merging architecture, art, and urbanism has led him to become one of the most prolific landscape architects for social change and spatial equity.

Early this July, Archinect contributing writer Rukshan Vathupola conducted an in-depth interview with Hood. In his piece, Othering Blackness in Design: Reflections with Walter Hood, Vathupola crafted a discussion that highlighted Hood not only as a practitioner but as an individual who challenges the perception of landscape architecture, design, and urbanism as a cultural practice.

View overlooking the Walter Hood-designed New de Young Museum gardens in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Image taken from the 9th-floor observation deck. Image © Mandy Sui Ta via Instagram/Courtesy of @deyoungmuseum

The hi...