Join Africatown Central District Preservation and Development Association and Design in Public for an inspiring non-traditional keynote presentation with the distinguished artist, designer, and educator Walter Hood. Make your voice heard on the open mic about the future of the Central District.
Walter is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is his tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. He is also a professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. Walter designs and creates urban spaces and objects that are public sculpture. Believing everyone needs beauty in their life, he makes use of everyday objects to create new apertures through which to see the surrounding emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies of urban space.
Walter will be joined by Nmadili Okwumabua, Founder of the Community Planning & Design Initiative Africa and a professor of African Architecture & Urban Design at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is an African architecture historian and CEO of Southern Sahara, a design consultancy specializing in the research and development of modern African architecture. As an urban planner Nmadili is committed to the development of quality, affordable housing in Africa and as an academic, she works to document and educate on contemporary practices in African urban design.
Her vision for Africa’s modern built environment is embedded in the philosophy and development of technologically advanced architecture that reflects the lifestyle and aesthetic values of the 21st century African. Through annual design-build competitions, CPDI Africa is poised to create the platform which talented designers can create a plethora of African inspired architecture, gain recognition and rewards for their pioneering efforts, and finally be gainfully employed in developing neighborhoods and communities in Africa and the diaspora that are culturally and environmentally sustainable.
5pm Doors | 5:30pm Program
This event is part of the Imagine Africatown Design Weekend, which brings together residents, design professionals, youth, business owners and those with historic roots in the Central District to plan the future. Africatown is an asset-based community development initiative focused on preserving and developing the Central District of Seattle as a place where the legacy of the Black community and African diaspora can grow and thrive.