EDA utilizes NEH Grant to celebrate Professor Walter Hood’s work

With a $95,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Collections and Reference Resources Grant (NEH), the Environmental Design Archives (EDA) has gained enough funding to organize, process, and include the work of professor and former chair of Landscape Architecture, Walter Hood, in their collection.

The EDA functions as a non-profit, self-supporting research unit housing one of the largest archival repositories of its kind west of the Mississippi. The EDA collects a variety of significant first-hand artifacts, documents, and collections, like Hood’s.

The EDA is making an effort to preserve Hood’s work — including projects, drawings, films, portfolios, born-digital design files, models, and personal sketchbooks — to match the increasing educational interest in the impact of designers in reshaping cities, and in Hood’s case, the forgotten edges of urban environments. With the endowment, Hood’s born-digital records will be retrieved from obsolete, proprietary removable computer media and later made accessible for study on campus and other online databases like the EDA website. Additionally, all materials processed in this project will be available for study on-site.