(Re)making History
BY HONESTLY ADDRESSING THE CONTENTIOUS PAST, WALTER HOOD’S LANDSCAPE DESIGNS SEEK TO WELCOME MORE USERS, FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, IN THE FUTURE
To create the civic spaces of the future, landscape architect Walter Hood thoughtfully revisits the past.
Walter Hood is hopeful. In the nearly three decades since he launched his practice in 1992, the Oakland, California-based landscape architect has witnessed a number of progressive flashpoints, instances in which, as he puts it, “we collectively were willing to act.” He cites the L.A. protests of the early 1990s, the dawn of the Obama era in the 2000s, and now — perhaps most encouragingly — the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that began last year. “I don’t know what this moment is,” he says, “but we’ve got to be ready.”
The notion of incremental change, of pushing against constant setbacks, also inspires Hood’s work, which draws from art, language and symbolism to recentre marginalized people in public spaces.
Hood defines his studio as a “cultural practice.” Among its completed works are Lafayette Square Park in his home city, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, the garden at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum and the exterior setting for the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The studio’s upcoming projects — palimpsests that foreground the often-hidden past of the U.S. — include the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina (the city where over half of the slave ships to the United States made port) and a park commemorating Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia.
Azure spoke with Hood, who is currently the Senior Loeb Scholar at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, before the storming of the U.S. Capitol by far-right Trumpists in January, but the conversation began with that storied building’s site: the National Mall, for which Hood had proposed a new landscape as part of an ideas lab seeking to redesign the frequently flooded Tidal Basin. Like many of his upcoming works, the plan sought to “re-present” the perspectives of those whose experiences have been erased from the official story.
For the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, your team created a series of narratives — about how groups of people will experience the redesigned landscape — inspired by graphic novels. Why did you choose this way to express your ideas? Is the envisioning of the experience for the end user the beginning of the design process?
The D.C. landscape as an allegory for the country is, for me, a very powerful way to think about it: that we built our national capital in a lowland swamp and we’re basically maintaining it by holding the waters at bay. There’s a lot of tension there. The story, then, is an origin story — the shining city on the hill, right? But who’s excluded from the story? Then there is the notion that you’re creating this fictitious landscape and having to add new narratives, new memorials, new monuments. So, we took a step back and said, “What if we didn’t approach it through fixing it, but through the experience of different Americans who weren’t part of it but are seeking different narratives about themselves?” That was a way for us to loosely talk about how the landscape can somewhat be a guide for us to talk about this notion of difference — if we’re willing to not keep making it the same. Which is a characteristic of colonialism: to make sameness.
During the recent American election, a majority of white people, to the surprise of many, still voted for Donald Trump. In the landscapes you create, are you concerned with how white people can also see these historical and cultural layers? Or are you more concerned with centring narratives of Black experience?
A little of both. I don’t think it’s an either–or proposition. In my class this year, we’re reading sociologist Joe Feagin’s The White Racial Frame. It posits that the settlers had to create their own identity in a place. And they created whiteness. Feagin writes that, for 82 per cent of our history on this continent, we’ve been separate, so this idea that whiteness has been the dominant frame makes sense. Again, we’ve only had 50 years where people have said, “Let’s try to live together.” Even in the late sixties, white people didn’t want to live with Blacks. We had to have federal law to come in and actually desegregate. A lot of the things we’re going through [as a result] make sense, and it’s going to be a long, arduous route [to reconciliation]. We’re trying to find ways to create this conversation and not just make a pedagogical intervention in the landscape.
We’re working on a project, in Arlington, Virginia, trying to commemorate Freedman’s Village. I suggested doing a piece that has the word “freed” — F-R-E-E-D — as the central iconic emblem. And there was a lot of discussion around, “Why are we saying ‘free’?” And I said, “You know, Blacks were freed. We didn’t come to this country to get freedom. We were actually freed; someone said, ‘You can go.’” So that’s the kind of conversation I would love to see at the surface, that it’s not just about fixing ecology.
It’s about thinking about ecological history and how cultures can begin to have conversations about how we can live together. And I don’t think we can live together until we know each other’s stories.
Word choice is very important to you. You prefer the term “difference” to “diversity,” you refer to “disinvested” communities and infrastructure (rather than, say, “underrepresented” or other euphemisms) and you’ve criticized the term “placemaking” as a form of erasure. Is changing the lexicon a core aspect of your work?
It’s huge. Over the past five years or so, I’ve been really struggling to find a way to talk about the studio work. And I found a connection in linguistic hybridity: the notion that there is a formal hybridity and an informal hybridity in language. The formal is about creating double negatives.
I’ve been working on projects like “Lafayette Square Park.” Okay…lafayette…it’s a square and it’s a park. Where did that name come from? You go back in history and it was Lafayette Square, then very early in the 20th century the citizens wanted the city to put more greenery in it, so over time people started referring to it as a park. I went, “Wow, it’s so interesting to see how culture informs these physical places over time.” And I thought, if I brought that into my design process, can I use it as a way to be more transgressive when I’m dealing with these typologies?
Informal hybridity is the future, because it’s departing from those typologies and it’s trying to develop new words, new associations for these places. And an example might be the Solar Strand we did in Buffalo. It’s a landscape but it’s based on these linear, quarter-mile-long walkways in between PV panels. Unbeknownst to us, three years after it was completed, it became a wildlife preserve. Because we didn’t use that language of “parkland” or “forest.”
Informal hybridity is the future, because it’s developing new words, new associations for places.
The cultural references you’re bringing in are also different from the typical language used by landscape architects. You cite writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin. Is this an important way of making landscape architecture tied more to the culture and the history?
Yes and no. I think a lot of it comes through maturation. Du Bois and Baldwin were part of my education very early; I just didn’t know how it fit within design. I went to an HBCU in North Carolina and had a very strong professional education in landscape architecture. By the time I came to California, I actually made my master’s degree a much more liberal arts education. But I still didn’t know how I could manifest a lot of these ideas that existed in literature, in art, that had a very strong cultural connection to me.
For a while, I never wanted to talk about the double consciousness — this notion that, when I walk into a room, people look at me as a Black man, that that’s the first thing they see. I’ve had to almost keep the veil on and actually respond that way, as opposed to taking the veil off and having people see me as an artist first. Working through a lot of these things has allowed me to be a little more emboldened about expressing this artistry, versus being afraid or acculturating into the profession to a certain degree and suggesting that that racial thing doesn’t exist. Once you get to a place where you’ve figured out a way to navigate, you can express yourself a little more freely. I think that, for me, literature and art has been that place.