Walter Hood ’81 gives final lecture in series with U.C. Berkeley

Renowned landscape designer, MacArthur “Genius” and North Carolina A&T alum Walter Hood ’81 returned virtually to the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences to give the final lecture in a year-long series on landscape architecture.

The former graduate of the college’s first landscape architecture class spoke to the program via Zoom on April 17 to deliver the seventh lecture in the Charles Fountain Memorial Lecture Series, a partnership between the landscape architecture programs at A&T and the University of California at Berkeley, where Hood is a faculty member.

“It’s my distinct pleasure to introduce Walter twice in a year,” said assistant professor Steve Cancian, one of Hood’s former students, “and it’s a good sign of building deeper connections between our illustrious alumni and our future illustrious alumni. Walter is really the only right person to deliver the final Dr. Fountain memorial lecture. He inspired us to do our best work; sometimes at two in the morning, but nonetheless, we worked very hard.”

Senior Chavious Burns and assistant professor W. Chris Harrison listen intently during Hood’s lecture.

Hood, founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA, is the 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant; a 2021 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, among other awards. Hood also gave the first lecture in the series, “Hybrid Landscapes”, in March 2022.

“It’s great that we’re here at the end of a year of lectures from my esteemed colleagues,” Hood said to the program’s students and faculty in Carver Hall. “I hope you got a lot out of it; I know they did and they were very appreciative of your time.”

Hood’s lecture, titled “Tripartite Dualities”, went into detail about the contrast of historical landscapes, their documented origins through semiotics and mapping with the reality of excluded cultures, such as Native Americans and early Chinese laborers, as well as the partitioning of colonial land; this contrast, Hood said, creates a “double logic” in which the landscape is contextualized into the canon of early American cartography but leaves out the history and identity of its original, native cultures and their land.

“The one thing that I keep coming back to is that there are two different Americas, whether we like it or not,” said Hood. “These dualities began from the day the colonies came to being. There were two worlds, and not until the end of the 20^th century – not even in the ‘60s or ‘70s, maybe until the 1980s – did we really talk about an integrated landscape. And I would posit that we’re still trying to figure out how to live with one another today.”

During the lecture, Hood offered updates and visual designs to two of his ongoing landscape projects in North Carolina: the Discovery Place Nature Museum in Charlotte and the Peter Oliver Pavilion Gallery in Winston-Salem. That project will be in the works this summer, according to Hood.

Students asked questions that varied from the type of ceramic, etching material Hood uses while designing to maintaining integrity and optimism in the wake of landscapes that are underutilized.

“I’m more of a pragmatist,” said Hood. “I would rather live in an optimist bubble than a  pessimistic bubble. This is pragmatism in America: that if you put an idea out into the world, the world will meet you halfway. I think our profession is currently living in a pessimistic state, particularly in places that I think need the most work. We’ve lost this power to dream in big ways, and to fail in big ways. I think to actually make a better future, we need to be able to fail big.”