Walter Hood. Credit: Hood Design Studio

Mr. Hood wouldn’t let his son go to art school, so he had to find the next best thing. Going through the rest of the list of college majors—accounting, advertising, agriculture, etc.—nothing else called out to him in the same way nor made the vision of the future he wanted any clearer or any more desirable. But then, an accidental discovery halfway through high school helped to make this vision a little less murky. One day, while walking through the hallways, Walter happened to stumble upon a very strange collection of people in a classroom. They were all standing at boards, in all-white cloaks, meticulously drafting away with T-squares in one hand and graphite in the other. 

The oddity of this activity, yet the familiarity of the act of drawing, drew him in and led Walter to commit to this drafting course for 2 years. At the same time, while watching the Brady Bunch at home, through observing Mike Brady’s sketches and plans, he discovered that buildings must first emerge from a designer's mind through drawing. This culminated in the creation of a ¼ scale model of a house during his senior year. This was wired by hand with circuitry for lighting and carried as precious cargo through the everyday perils of a high school bus and hallway, before being presented to that once odd group of drafters that Walter now belonged to. He had found the next best thing, and that was architecture.   

Soon after Walter checked off architecture on his college application, he went off to North Carolina A&T State University. But at the same time, those feelings of uncertainty, feelings that have always been there to a lesser degree, began to build up within him that wherever he was, he just didn’t fit in. Though he enjoyed his architectural education, graduating college, and working, Walter always felt that there was always just something missing from these experiences. In order to remedy this, he decided to go back to school and continue his education by pursuing a Master’s degree at Berkeley. 

However, before heading out west, he made his way to New York. The cabinetry of Philip Johnson’s 1984 Chippendale building had just interrupted an expanse of glass and steel, casting a new shadow upon the landscape of Manhattan. Beneath it all and between the graffiti speckled trains that crisscrossed the city, Walter was there drawing all those new towers in his sketchbook. Soon the spirits of the times enveloped him with a desire to build high-rises himself, curating a vision for the future that sustained his cross-country trek to California.   

Arriving at Berkeley, Walter entered the concrete confines of the architecture building, Wurster Hall, with his then-girlfriend. As he saw the students’ drawings, remnants of models old and new pinned up above him in the studio, a familiar yet creeping sense of uncertainty began to build within him. Bubbling over, he turned to his girlfriend and confessed: "I'm doomed." She looked back sympathetically and attempting to offer some comfort said: "No no, you are going to be fine." "No, I’m going to be doomed, I can’t do this,'' he responded as all those worries for the future and those feelings of not fitting in rushed back all at once. 

Once school started, it was exciting to research, design, and learn about theory, but those underlying uncertainties still remained. It wasn’t until a professor half-jokingly, half-critically remarked "You know you just want to do everything," did it push Walter to define for himself who he was and what he wanted to pursue. 

Reflecting on this nearly 30 years later, he remembers that this helped to propel him to define his interest in the multiple dimensions of design and art. "Because the most boring thing is to say 'This is architecture, and this is landscape' before you can even have a dialogue with the space and the environment. So that's been the biggest thing for me, continually stepping out of these different cultural contexts and stepping into something completely blind...that's probably been the most exciting, and the scariest, part of my career because I've taken chances in different places and [never] knew how things are going to be resolved."        

Why am I an African-American—why can't I just be an American? And if I'm an American, as a designer, part of that design is imbued with my blackness. However, instead of that, I have to be [labeled] a Black architect.

After graduating from Berkley, Walter started a practice in nearby Oakland in 1992 and subsequently became a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Chair of the department for a time. And though he reminisces that "I always wanted to make high-rises. That was the one thing in my brain that I never did," in spring 2021, Walter’s towers now rise at MoMa for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. 

Walter’s project titled "Black Towers/Black Power" is a collage of models, videos, and prints that present a design for a one-mile stretch of San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, 10 towers that reflect each one of the Ten-Point Program developed by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale for the Black Panthers in 1966. 

At the same time, Walter expressed frustration with the performative nature in which blackness is perceived in the architecture community and the greater American society in response to the projects Black designers are expected to make. "Why am I an African-American—why can't I just be an American? And if I'm an American, as a designer, part of that design is imbued with my blackness. However, instead of that, I have to be [labeled] a Black architect. [But] if I make a building as a Black architect, [the general reception is that] there's no blackness in it unless there's something weird going on that someone can point to and go, oh, a Black architect did that. [The expectation is] that it has to be something so different [so special] if it's for Black people, and this is the problem. We can't exist in this ordinary way, you have to exist in an extraordinary almost magical way, which is traumatic and very exhausting." 

"For the African part of my heritage, this is what I loved about South Africa, this is what I love about West Africa, this is what I loved about North Africa, this is what I loved about East Africa. There were just things that I felt this connection to. And it's a cultural connection, it's these instinctual things, how people do things, how people look, how people make patterns and practice, those things are something that are almost innate from place to place. And here [in America], it's almost as if you [are made] to wear your identity on your sleeve [and perform it]."

Expounding on a recent housing project in San Francisco, Walter remarked that "when [the firm] talks about that specialness, we just call it strange so we just ask different questions [of the community we design for], and it comes out different. But it has nothing to do with my race, this is the funny thing, and yet people immediately look at it and go like oh that there must be something Black about that." For this project, the firm looked at times in San Francisco's past when there weren’t these hard lines between neighborhoods such as the World’s Fair in 1915, and how that history can be used to inform connections between communities today. 

However, Walter also noted the difficulty when looking at the often idealized layers of the American and colonial past, as people back then still "had to improvise existence within those structures." He brings up the issue of documenting Jim Crow and how there is a romanticization of "when you had all the blues clubs, but you still have to factor in that people were still being traumatized within that" past. Therefore, for Walter the questions concerning design are not centered on solving a problem, the questions become “How do I validate people?... How do I get inspired by people's lives? So that the work that you make takes their lives into consideration, and the thing that you're making validates them [and celebrates them]... instead of giving them a kind of a Western thing to like fit into. I need to dig and find something they see around them [that] no one [else] is taking into consideration." 

In America, different groups get appropriated when they become more powerful, and I think you see the same thing in the Black community

While there is the need to dig deeper, there is also the issue of appropriation from these communities and how often tropes, both political and architectural, are projected onto people. Walter, looking back at the past of New York City, remarked that now "graffiti got appropriated because the group that had it was using it for power." 

In the ’80s, in an environment where people's lives were terrible and they were made to live in the garbage, "the city is going to be painted over, and the city was." But slowly, through this appropriation, "it got disempowered because all of a sudden, that local person tagging a building now can't compete with a $5 million piece" that was made for someone to advertise on. 

"In America, different groups get appropriated when they become more powerful, and I think you see the same thing in the Black community," Walter remarked, adding, "you heard a lot of this over the last year...you know: you like Black music, you like Black literature, but you don't like Black people...and this is what I was saying earlier: How do we take control over those things that are being appropriated? And I think in architecture and landscape, those things have not been [accurately] articulated what they are. In music, we know what they are, in film, we know what they are, in literature, we know what they are, as our stories and our narratives. But when you kind of think of architecture and design out in the public realm, it's almost as if we have to be different, we can't be American. And oftentimes in these marginalized spaces, more people are welcome, while in the more privileged areas, even with more resources, fewer people are let in." 

So, Walter concluded that: "How can we curate the space and create these ways in [which] we want people to come in and experience our neighborhood on our own terms which adds value? Instead of adding value [through simple preservation] and just being like 'Oh, let's go and see some old stuff, right?'"