Recap of lecture on 10/15/12 - watch video here

Walter Hood: A Cultural Practice

http://wjhooddesign.com/

Practice/Process
- practice: 1 writer + 2 architects + 1 landscape architect + 1 product designer
- mundane/everyday – commemorative – community design
- process: periods of determination within an otherwise rigid design process allow for dreaming, reimagining the world – likened to jazz improvisation

Bio line
- installation at Art Institute of Chicago, where Hood enrolled in MFA program
- parasitic sculpture – aluminum sculpture over air ducts in Sullivan Galleries allows plants to grow from ceiling, referencing Sullivan’s natural ornament

Canned Spinach
- temporary exhibit at Oakland Museum of California
- observes city’s past as center of vegetable and fruit canning with Del Monte

Baisley Park

- Jamaica Queens – institutionalized community garden
- ownership and education through planting own food
- opening with 50 Cent and Bette Midler energizes space through cultural involvement

San Jose Airport Gateway
- 15 acres around highway interchange
- community expected typical sculptural grid to recall agricultural geometries
- instead, grew plants in a linear fashion, then created aluminum bales that suggest movement as people drive by – about car moving through

Water Table Spoleto Festival

- reflect dependence, cultural exchange – slaves and settlers combined knowledge and resources to grow rice
- created wetland in school courtyard; conviction that wetland will always be a wetland, marsh will always be marsh – reversion

Phillips Community
- over 100 years, the community adapted to the marsh, remained mostly agrarian, but has changed in the last few decades with urbanism and development
- new development is about itself, not about the landscape
- lifeways plan – maintain minimum 40’ overgrowth between existing community and new development
- maintain urban pattern, hydrology, habitat; prevent detrimental road development

San Francisco Mint
- wetland on roof – water, birds, animals
- elucidate hydrology of the area
- water on both sides; cultural and natural response

Union Street Residence
- garden and house equal footprints – unique for San Francisco
- kitchen opens to garden

Telegraph Hill Residence

- floor raises up at end to block view of big boxes and direct view to landscape
- collapse middle ground through greenery growing up from the floor, disguising the edge of the roof

Powell St Promenade
- installation created parklets over two blocks of busiest pedestrian area in San Francisco
- planters, benches, and standing tables; aluminum furniture rises out of grating
- typically, don’t see the design in images of the project, only people

Splashpad Park

- intended to create connection between parking under freeway and shopping center
- originally a glorified crosswalk project, the community raised more money to create an actual place
- now hosts one of the largest farmers market in San Francisco bay area

Garden Passage
- located in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh Penguins arena
- function of catching water achieved through rain gardens; curtains of images of people and places in the Hill District accompany these gardens
- overwhelming response of people bringing pictures to public barbeques, so an archive system was established to gather images, which would be put on glass curtains
- highlight impact on community
- understanding of rain gardens – rain songs – R&B – speak to musical history of Pittsburgh, once considered the Chicago of the east

Greenprint - Hill District Pittsburgh

- “inverted Central Park” – development on interior, green ring surrounding
- residents don’t need to find the rivers in Pittsburgh – they need a greater association with their context
- started by defining old coal paths, cleaning existing historic stairs
- small interventions around existing places – enhancing sectional relationship
- instead of a formal final presentation, designers took residents through paths,
ended at the police station, historically contentious, but started a community conversation

New De Young Museum
- palm trees over underground parking garage – trees there in the past, brought back
- ferns – understand cultural exchange with Australia
- connections to Japanese Tea Garden, James Turrell skyspace, Golden Gate Park

University of Buffalo Solar Strand
- history of site – questioning of place
- topsoil had been previously removed, so no significant tree canopy existed
- car heavy culture – huge carbon footprint
- stranded landscape – wrote a script to help organize panel layout in reference to DNA strand, shadow pattern
- used torn up sidewalks on campus for site pathways
- local nursery owner knew a way to grow trees without topsoil, so students helped plant trees around campus – beginning of pedagogical and cultural change

Jackson Sculpture Terrace
- donors wanted sculpture trail to museum
- existing site overwhelmed by blacktop/parking
- take out 1/3 of parking, change arrival sequence
- push car away from building, more pedestrian character allows better view of landscape

UVA Shadow Catcher

- shadow and reflection
- African American folklore – catching a ride to heaven through light; release of spirit
- slump of graves – landscape once lived in

All images from http://wjhooddesign.com/

Next SAID lecture: Hagy Belzberg, 10/17/12 at 5:00 pm in DAAP 5401