de Young Museum landscape

de Young Museum landscape, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, California

Designed by Walter Hood in 2005

Designer Walter Hood received both Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. In 1997, Hood was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture. He specializes in landscape design; community development; citizen participation; the design of architecture and the landscape simultaneously, and has worked in a variety of settings including architecture, landscape architecture, art, community and urban design, and planning and research. His design projects focus almost exclusively on the public realm and urban environments. Hood's innovative public spaces are known for the way they embrace the essence of urban environments and for their links to urban redevelopment and neighborhood revitalization. Hood teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, and is the principal of Hood Design in Oakland California.

As the landscape architect for Herzog & de Mueron’s 2005 de Young Museum Walter Hood’s sketch of the northeast end of is a loosely rendered vision of how elements present in the park setting (pond, palms, sphinxes, and eucalyptus) were to be integrated with the angular museum. Ten years after the museum’s opening, the grounds designed by Hood successfully complement the perforated skin and sharp edges of the building by providing contrasts in the sweeping circular geometry of the pond and in the rough outsized foliage of the Giant Gunnera (Gunnera manicata) that borders the gardens and thrives in the pool’s center.  

Drawn with an almost impossibly wide perspective, I photographed the area depicted with a very wide angle lens, splitting the view into three parts to capture the setting.