WALTER HOOD:

My name is Walter Hood. Within a one mile stretch of San Pablo Avenue, there is the highest concentration of low-income housing in Oakland, California. And my project suggests that maybe we can rethink this through the insertion of ten high rise buildings and those high-rise buildings are based on that Ten Point Program that was developed by the Black Panthers. 

The Black Panther Party grew out of the West Oakland neighborhood in the late sixties, and it came about because of the incarceration of African Americans within a ghetto-ized system. A Ten Point Program suggests that we should be self-sufficient. Let’s have housing. Let’s take care of our community. Let’s stop capitalist theft. Let’s think about education, food, the economy and who’s in control of those things. 

My project is a hybrid collage of models of drawings and a video. The screed is central to the idea. It’s planted with lush plantings. The paving is based on the prints of Black Panthers. The public spaces are imbued with our radical heroes. The architecture begins to create community space. You can go to a place that teaches you about civic lessons, about jurisprudence.  

It has been really hard for Brown and Black people to imagine a future in this country. And so in, Back Towers, Black Power, there’s a fiction that narrates the entire story, these towers. And by using fiction, maybe it’s possible to reimagine ourselves in new places.