Q&A: Walter Hood’s Vision for Renewing Neglected Urban Spaces
The celebrated Oakland artist and designer wants policymakers to reinvest in written-off neighborhoods.
The celebrated Oakland artist and designer wants policymakers to reinvest in written-off neighborhoods.
Last year marked a widespread reckoning with racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and amid a pandemic disproportionately affecting communities of color.
But that’s not what prompted Oakland artist and designer Walter Hood, 2019 recipient of both the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, to focus on social justice and the environment. "I have always paid attention to that," he says. "Environmental degradation is linked to how we value the people on the land."
A breakout example of Walter Hood’s championing of neglected urban spaces, Splash Pad Park (pictured), completed in 2003, uses palm trees and a water feature to soften the underside of Oakland’s MacArthur Freeway. It reestablishes the connection between the city’s Grand Lake Theater and Lake Merritt, which had been severed by the elevated roadway’s construction. For nearly two decades, the park has hosted the city’s largest farmers’ market.
Photo courtesy of Hood Design Studio
A tenured professor at UC Berkeley, Hood recently co-edited Black Landscapes Matter (University of Virginia Press, 2020), a book of essays that draw a line from colonial plantations and slavery to segregated cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was raised. "Racist policies in the built environment promote disinvestment in Black geographies and cultural landscapes," he explains.
Since 1992, his firm, Hood Design Studio, has focused on improving areas alongside polluted waters, under freeways, and in flood zones, all places where the poorest populations often live. With many projects in the works, the landscape design concept for South Carolina’s upcoming International African American Museum among them, Hood says he is busier than ever. But we spoke about what matters most to him now: bolstering redlined, ecologically marginalized, yet resilient Black communities.
For the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, which runs through May 31 at MoMA, Hood conceived a series of 10 towers (pictured) for a stretch of West Oakland (pictured below) where investment is typically limited to poverty mitigation measures.
Photo courtesy of Hood Design Studio
Each tower in the exhibit would be home to an organization providing community support based on ideas in the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program—education, housing, and employment among them. Their designs are based on important utilitarian objects invented by Black creators. Alfred L. Cralle’s 1897 ice cream scoop inspired one tower concept.
Photo courtesy of Hood Design Studio
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