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(UN)COMMON
GROUND
GROUND
LANDSCAPE SAGE
WALTER HOOD
REIMAGINES THE POWER OF
PUBLIC SPACE
A Landscape Iconoclast Breaks New Ground
Despite his three-plus decades of practice and internationally celebrated career as a landscape designer, Walter Hood doesn’t really design landscapes. Instead, from his eponymous studio in Oakland, Hood interrogates, interprets and amplifies the narratives the place, the land, already holds. The community-enriching results of this nuanced approach are on display from iconic California cultural institutions to his most recent Legacy-defining contributions to the newly unveiled International African American Museum in Charleston.
The International African American Museum on GadSDen's Wharf
The fountain/infinity pool below the IAAM features engraved figures that represent captives in the hold of a slave ship. The pool fronts the wharf and fills and empties on tide-like cycles.
Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ unrhetorical building design “floats” on cylinder-like piers, leaving the sacred ground below open for Hood’s activation. Black marble walls suggest the “hush harbors” tradition—landscapes where Africans would gather in secret to share and keep alive stories from their homeland.
One of a series of abstract forms suggesting humans emerging from bondage.
Benches for contemplation in the Ancestors’ Garden and a Badge Frame art installation that pays tribute to the resilience of those forced to carry “slave badges” as symbols of dehumanization.
A serpentine brick wall embraces a stelae garden of abstract monuments to ancestors.
The threshold where more than 40 percent of the African diaspora arrived as enslaved chattel.
“ITS ALL GOOD IN THE HOOD” proclaims an old bumper sticker (in artful all caps, no apostrophe) in the bottom glass pane of Hood Design Studio’s ruby red door, a funky vintage doorknocker beside it. It’s all good inside, too, where throughout the studio's three floors associates are busy fine-tuning details of current landscape design and art installation projects and preparing concepts and prototypes for one of their most urgent endeavors, the Venice Architecture Biennale.
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An early conceptual prototype.
Just outside Fire Station No. 35, BOW, a public sculpture/art installation on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, paying homage to the heroism of fire boats after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
The art-filled geometric gardens at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.
“Black Towers/Black Power” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. Part of “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” the first-ever MoMA exhibit to feature Black architects.
The Hood-renovated Arthur Ross Terrace and Garden at Cooper Hewitt, on the original Carnegie Mansion property.
Photo courtesy of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Photo courtesy of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Oakland’s Splash Pad Park, activating formerly unused space below the overpass.
Photo by Katie Standke.
Photo by Katie Standke.
