I for one don't want to see the corporate minded thinking that has destroyed the WTC Site take over in New Orleans. Corporations like Halliburton and Wal Mart are slobbering over what Rice called the redevelopment "opportunities" of natural disasters like The Tsunamai and now Hurricane Katrina.
So, meet Walter Hood; an African American Architect, Landscape Architect, and Urban Designer who takes inspiration from the Blues, the improvisations of Jazz, community interaction, and ethnicity. Granted this should be a team effort. But that's why we need a visionary in charge who believes in the power of grassroots work... who believes in the power of involving the citizens in these communities in the actual design process itself.
Walter Hood
Chair of Landscape Architecture at UC -Berkeley
Principal of Hood Design
Oakland, CA.
Walter Hood is an Associate Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland, CA. Hood has worked in a variety of settings including community design, urban design, planning and research. He specializes in urban landscapes that draw upon the city as context, rather than the more traditional practice of importing and modifying rural precedents. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture in 1997. He has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad.
Walter Hood's published monographs, "Urban Diaries" and "Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations," illuminate his unique approach to the design of urban landscapes. His work won an ASLA Research award in 1996.
From a debate on PBS' News Hour
WALTER HOOD: Oh, most definitely. I mean if you go to some of the inner city schools today, I mean, they're like fortresses. As Mr. Stern just said, I mean it's much more introverted when we think about it. You can't today walk inside of a junior high or a high school in most cities, because you either have to be led in by the principal or the security guards. At one time, our educational facilities, they were actually part of our public realm.
Now they're actually becoming more privatized. I think you can also look at labor and housing and other public spaces, labor meaning jobs -- who actually work in the neighborhood. You're finding most people work outside of their neighborhoods. There's a trend now from a lot of architects and a lot of planners to begin to bring those jobs back into the community. I would like it to go one step forward and to begin to think about the quality of life in those communities, and how neighborhood residents can actually participate -- if it's not through just basic things like street cleaners, to maintenance people within parks, to people actually taking part and investing back within that public landscape.
Here's a project by Hood.
"Eucalyptus Soliloquy," by Walter Hood & Alma DuSolier
Cornerstone Gardens, Sonoma, CA