THE UB SOLAR STRAND Artist, Landscape Architect Walter Hood and Dean Robert G. Shibley, UB’s Campus Architect, Reflect on Design Process Behind UB’s New Ground-Mounted Solar Array
/// By Rachel Teaman A group of architecture students gathers in an open field, between a stand of old-growth oak trees and the first of 3,200 gleaming black solar panels that stretch one-quarter mile into UB’s North Campus to form the UB Solar Strand. To Walter Hood, the Oakland-based artist and landscape architect who designed the ground-mounted solar array, this is a perfect start for his tour. “When we started this, we asked ourselves, ‘can we bring some of that wildness, that messiness in?’” says Hood, sweeping his arm from the craggy trees and the vernal pools beneath them to the clean lines and rigid steel frames of the solar panels. A statement of engineering and technological innovation, the Solar Strand has also been carefully woven into the fabric of the surrounding campus landscape — a balance that gets to the core of Hood’s vision for the Solar Strand. “That’s what we’re talking about here, the dialectic over time between humans and place. We’re in this landscape,” said Hood, founding principal of Hood Design and professor and former chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley.
/ Students gather under old-growth oak trees for their tour of the UB Solar Strand, designed to respond to and connect with the larger campus landscape. / Photo by Douglas Levere
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