 I'm Brent Leggs, the Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I want to welcome you to the 2021 National Preservation Conference. The Action Fund is this year's sponsor of the Promoting Equity, Injustice and Historic Preservation Conference track. And we're thrilled to launch the conference program with renowned artist, landscape architect and author Walter Hood. Before I interview Walter, I want to share opening remarks to center this conversation in our conference theme. In solidarity with African Americans, a multiracial coalition is marching in the footsteps of earlier generations whose vision for equality and human rights continues to inspire. Nevertheless, the preservation movement is flawed. In the not too distant past, historic sites were preserved to reinforce the white majority's narrative and to communicate idealized but unevenly realized American values. We must face the fact that history and the character of our nation is carved out of chasms of racial brutality and economic exploitation, and out of the self-determination, character and resilience that moves our nation to its best self. By preserving these places and telling their stories, preservationists inspire a commitment to equity and justice. By preserving the beauty, uniqueness, complexity and significance of historic African American sites, we can craft a more accurate American narrative and identity. We stimulate revitalization and foster interest in places that today seem to exist without history or meaning. Spanning space, time and geography, African American and diverse cultural sites can anchor us and expand our sense of pride and agency. I feel it's critically important to acknowledge that the nation may be rich in diverse history, but it has often been poor representation of that history and in funding its protection, conservation and recognition. BIPOC sites, whether cultural landscapes or historic buildings, deserve the same stewardship and admiration as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Vanderbilt's Biltmore State. Regrettably, grassroots efforts to preserve places of diverse history are some of the most underfunded. For instance, the Action Fund has received a remarkable 2,300 grant proposals since 2018, totaling nearly $253 million. A response on this scale speaks to the need for significant investment in preserving this impressive collection of places and stories. It also represents that African American landmarks are in critical need of financial support. With urgency and intention, the public must invest in and restore more assets that hold exceptional cultural value. The National Trust launched the Action Fund in 2017 to reconstruct a true national identity that reflects America's diversity. I'm proud to lead this effort for the National Trust. Through historic preservation practice, we aim to expose the world and our nation to the culture, ideals, politics, art and the hope of America. We tell overlooked stories embodied in these places. Ones of African American resilience, activism and achievement that are fundamental to the nation itself. Preserving this tapestry of our shared culture, pride and heritage is an act of racial justice and should be viewed as a civil right. Today we supported more than 200 preservation projects nationwide and raised more than $50 million thanks to our partnerships and an esteemed National Advisory Council. We can also expand the conversation to answer both questions. How should America preserve BIPOC monuments and landscapes so that we never forget their meaning in history? What's the role of the BIPOC community, civic leaders, preservationists, artists and funders to envision landscapes of understanding and reconciliation? The purpose of preservation practice is not to stop change, but to offer tools that help society manage change in ways that do not disconnect it from the legacies of its past. Done right, historic places can foster real healing, true equity and a validation of all Americans and their history. Join us in honoring and telling the full American story and in leading the change we all seek. Walter it's so good to see you and to be with you today. How you doing Brent? Glad to be here. In your book, Black Landscapes Matter, you write in the introduction. Black landscapes matter because they are prophetic. They tell the truth of the struggles and victories of African Americans in North America. Black landscapes matter because they can be born again. Your writing is both poetic and intellectual. It challenges our nation in profession to build an ethic for the conservation of BIPOC landscapes imbued with important stories and sacred memories. As historic preservation, we've often prioritized protecting old buildings versus the natural landscape. Why should more Americans and preservationists elevate landscape preservation and create reverence for these historic spaces? That's a wonderful question, Brent. And very complex, just like the quote that you just sort of quote it. For me, it's at the end of the day when buildings disappear, the landscape is still there. And I have been privy to wonderful experiences around the world to go to places where there had been either civilization or people inhabiting a place. And the most wonderful sort of memory and actually strategies that I've collected from that is there's always something there. If you choose to see it and, you know, I'm taken by in history, you know, we can go to the Roman Forum and find all kinds of things. But then if I go to Charleston, South Carolina, I find nothing, right? And so to me, it's all there. It's just that we have to sort of be vigilant to sort of exhume it and kind of want it. And it takes courage because in doing so, we say something about ourselves. And I think, you know, in our national memory, we only like to remember those things that, you know, make us heroic, that make us powerful. We don't want to remember those things that make us vulnerable, right? That make us have this empathy, that make us want to reconcile, that makes us want to forgive, you know, all of those things that I think human nature really wants us to sort of collectively, you know, have this relationship to one another. And so I think in the landscape, there are so many different stories that create a collective if we choose to do so. I love that you just mentioned the word empathy. And it made me think about, or just to view, what does an empathetic landscape look like? How would you describe empathy? Yeah, empathy for me in a landscape means that there is kind of care in wanting to remember, but also wanting to represent and really getting out of your way, right? I think a lot of us in design and even in preservation, we're in the way because we have this view. And if we get out of the way and let those other things lead us, they will take us to these different places where, you know, we're then able to have that joy and that pain, right, collectively together. It's not an either or thing. I think we like our joy over here and we like our pain over here. And to me, that empathetic landscape kind of mixes those two things together. And it allows you to sort of, right, have that reverence, right, in space. I love that balancing public memory. I'm curious about how you got inspired to contribute to this work. And I wonder if you have a first memory, whether as a child or an adult that's connected you to cultural landscape, heritage and conservation that's inspired your passion, career and ideas. Yeah, from a very early memory, I think, you know, my childhood growing up in rural America, North Carolina, you know, in the 70s and also later, my first job in the National Park Service, right. And I never really connected those two things together, right. You know, I spent summers in Tobacco Road, right, with my, you know, uncles who were sharecroppers. I spent, you know, time with my grandmother, you know, in literally in agricultural fields. And so that kind of memory of landscape in North Carolina, if you've ever been there, it's like, it's green. Everything is green, right. And as a kid, we were just in the landscape all the time. And then I, by Zoom ahead, you know, 15 years when I was at this HBCU, North Carolina A&T, one of my faculty members said, you should take this job in the Blue Ridge Parkway. And I went and got a job with the National Park Service. And there were three things that they covered it as part of the job. It was preservation, reservation and conservation of landscapes. And I had a chance then to sort of witness how the national memory is constructed through design. And as I was working through that work, and I then moved to Washington, DC, and I worked for the National Capital Planning for one year. And then I got really bored with it. And I wanted to really do work that impacted the early day, right. And so years later, as I'm doing urban work, slowly a lot of those memories started to come back. And one of them, in particular, returning back to Charleston, South Carolina, or to the South a decade or so ago, it reminded me of my southern roots. And it also gave me a kind of a clarity to kind of go deeper and remember that I was around storytellers when I was growing up, right. That people had ways of imbuing the landscape through a kind of a collective memory. And then I started thinking about the park service work. And all of these things started to come together through art. As I kind of freed myself from the more professional aspects. I started digging deeper and saying, well, there's gotta be something here, a way to critique. Why was I bored with these national landscapes, right? And the reason why I was bored was because they only tell in one story. And if you went back in there and started filtering out those other stories, it then gave me a better way than to put all of these things together and actually use that as a way to, how can I say, force creativity within my studio work, within my academic work, and then within my public life. But I love that you mentioned the role of preservationist to construct national memory. And the program that I run the App American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, our mission is to reconstruct national identity that reflects America's true diversity. And that work is so important that all citizens can see themselves in the landscape and historic buildings and have their stories reflected in spaces around them. I'm curious about your work on the title basin. And as you know, this was sponsored by the National Trust and presented by American Express. And I'm curious about your proposal and this iconic memorial landscape in the heart of DC is provocative and innovative in its format, really a graphic novella in four parts. One shows an African-American family on a tour of Washington DC. At the title basin, they wander through restored wetlands and elevated walkways, discovering the lost black history of Washington DC and its landscapes, namely a hush harbor. Can you tell us more about your vision for such monumental public spaces like the title basin? Yeah, it's, you know, working on the title basin was just really fantastic. So I have to thank you guys for supporting, you know, designers to kind of think about these landscapes in a, in a context where, you know, we're able to be very liberal in how, you know, our thoughts can come to the place. And I was taken by a couple of things. One, you know, I've always had this, this relationship with Washington DC, knowing that it's a fiction, right? Knowing that, you know, it's basically a swampy landscape that has been, how can I say it, given a fictitious origin story, right? And that's always sort of intrigued me. But it's also, as I become more learned about the American story and particular about the slave story, in the Aboriginal story here, the wetlands in America play a big, big role, right, in, in constructing those cultures. You know, whether you're in the, in the South, whether the dismal swamps, but these, these landscapes actually gave people places of refuge, but they gave people also a place of diversity, biodiversity, right? And so water has always been this, this big, big thing for me, and particularly as it relates to spirituality, right? My mother, I remember her telling me very early as a kid that she was actually baptized in the Cape Fear River. But that image, right, of my mother walking down to the river, right? I have this fictitious memory, right? So, so the swamp to me is, water is this very powerful thing. And as we were doing the tidal basin, I was struck by the, the narrative that the tidal basin was a swimming area at one point in time until, until it, it was conceived to be integrated. And once people wanted to integrate, it ceased becoming a swimming place. And so this idea of like this kind of shared resource, I started thinking maybe if I could conjure up these other ideas about water, it becomes less precious, right? It becomes less of a fiction and maybe it can actually return, right? And in a way, you know, for me seeing how histories are constructed and people making decisions, this is where you can kind of push back through design, right? And you don't have to be direct to say, oh, the reason why I want to bring up hush harbors here is because of the racial tension that existed, you know, 70 years ago. It's actually doing the opposite. It's telling a different story so that maybe people in time might begin to see the tidal basin different and then want to advocate for making it something completely different versus keeping it as this kind of rigid fiction. And so we didn't want to repair it. We didn't want to say, yeah, let's go back to the origins. We're suggesting it's a hybrid and it could keep evolving, but it should evolve maybe through these sort of cultural identities. And where else might we conceive of similar work like that at the tidal basin? You think there are other opportunities for reimagining the ecology? Oh, yeah. Well, New Orleans, I think, you know, I think, again, I think in places where communities have been most vulnerable in this country, particularly marginal communities, brown and black communities, are in these environmental degradated areas that we know. And, you know, again, I think history can teach us how to live with water. Why, if we choose to do it, I mean, there are great stories of, you know, natives and Africans in Louisiana living in the swamps, man, to sort of not, you know, be part of plantation life. And they figured out ways to sort of live with the water, right? And so, again, I think if we're interested, right, in the truth about these places, it might help us see the landscape and how we can live with it in a very different way. One of my favorite books is Archibones, by Henry Dumas, that Toni Morrison found, you know, his work and reprinted it, I think in the late 80s. But I read this book, he talked about the Archibones, that there is this mythical ship going up and down the Mississippi, collecting bones, right, of our black ancestors. That's a very powerful idea, right, because it links you back in time to what that river really means, right? And so those ideas for me can help us actually, again, see places anew and maybe give us different ways to begin to design the world around us. I want to talk about some of your projects and, you know, your work has transformed some of America's most historic and significant landscapes, like the campus of the University of Virginia, Charleston's Gadsons Wharf and Pittsburgh's Hill District. As you begin working on projects like these that has and will transform space, history and memory at different scales, share with us your design thinking and process and approach to creating equitable, yet thought-provoking public spaces and memorials. I mean, you mentioned, you know, a few works and all of the work I would just start out saying is very difficult work to do, right? I'll start with the Hill District. We've been working there probably over the last decade. And very little has come to fruition. It's about a thousand acres. It has a historic legacy, but it's a very valuable land, right? And that value can either exist in its potential, right? As new development or that value can exist as a cultural landscape, you know? And we've tried to get people to see it as a cultural landscape. And, you know, we just haven't been, we were not successful, you know? It's a greater, you know, as a as an urban designer and artist, you know, I'm not a developer, I'm not a politician, right? I'm not, you know, all the kind of the the local politics of an area. You know, you really need a team of people to come and and actually think in the same way. And we tried to get people to see the Hill District, which is an urban area that is how can I say its history is cold. Basically, immigrants came to the Hill to mine the cold. As everyone else had access to other areas, we were left there, which is our cultural landscape story. We then lived in that landscape for, you know, 50 or so years as it's being disinvested. And I think what we've been trying to do is get inhabitants who have lived in these places, we have to give them other means to imagine themselves. And again, if you're in a place for so long and you've been devalued or your landscape has been devalued, it's really hard for you to maybe to even accept another way because you're only familiar with one way. Right. And so we try to sort of really think about through disinvestment, you got a landscape back and that people were living in this wild landscape. And it's a different aesthetic, right? And so we talked about the woods a lot when we're in Pittsburgh. And and I could see the black community getting it, right? It's like woods. Yeah, we get it. But the institutions that make parks that make landscapes, they don't get it. It's really hard for a city to like let land go, right? And just, you know, just let it be, right? And in a way, that's what has happened in a lot of places, which I try to get people to say, if you go out to the suburbs, to a 19th century suburb, it looks just like these wild areas in urban areas. Why do we allow one to look this way? And we can't imagine people like me to be in that area, right? Because all of a sudden you want to make it different. So that's the ongoing work in the hill and it's taught me a lot. And we continue to work there. The work in Charleston and the work in at UVA is a little different in that those works commemorate, right? They try they're attempting to commemorate individuals or actions in a period of time. And we use commemoration not as a memorial, but again, as a way to remember. And at UVA, I was I was I struggled with, you know, trying to find the means through the medium that I had learned. And I had to sort of turn back to the mythologies that I was taught through storytelling as a kid. And one of the things that I remembered was the flash of the spirit, which, you know, shadow and reflection, you know, it's something that my grandmother would always talk about. Like if you go to a cemetery, you will see the poinsettias and you will see the foil turn back or you'll see someone leaving a little airplane. It's always about flight. It's always about, right, ascending and moving away from this place. And so we built the shadow catcher for Miss Foster, right, which is again, it's a mythical structure that talked about a kind of more spiritual aspect of our life. And for me, that was a way it kind of freed me up, right, to allow that I could say that, look, I can talk about the spirit and people will get it. And I have to tell you, I've lectured around the world and people get it and we don't have spaces where where people are talking about spirituality in a non-denominational way, right. I'm just talking about it as a as an experience of looking at the ground and looking back up at the sky, right. And that project in a way gave us the juice. I'm going to use that term, you know, to try other projects, you know, whether it's a statue that reads freed, F-R-E-E-D, Gilded will be in Arlington, Virginia. We'll probably go up in January that talks about the Friedman's village that was in Arlington Cemetery and how that diaspora of blacks kind of moved on into Arlington. And no one really talks about that. Or in Charleston, where we know, you know, upwards to 40 percent of the slave diaspora landed at Gaston's Wharf. And how do you tell that story? There's no other landscape that I can go to and say that, right. I can maybe go to Toni Morrison's bench by the road and talk about what happened in these places, what happened in these ports. But there is no historic landscape that I could go to other than a plantation, other than, you know, a building. And so this is a is a moment for us to really do something audacious in the landscape. And so we're inspired by the Brooks map, which was that first lithograph, you know, that depicted slaves in the halls of ships. And now we have a big fountain that will actually go wet and dry, wet and dry as a reminder, right, that bodies, bodies, right. We're basically left here, right. And the body becomes an important image then at the museum when you experience it. Well, you were speaking, I kept hearing your words from Black Landscapes Matter about resuscitating the landscape. And also I was thinking about the resurrection, literally connected to the spirituality that you talked about and the power of historic preservation to reduce that gap between space and time and it becomes spiritual in essence. What are some opportunities that our people are going to be able to do that our profession has to resuscitate and resurrect land and memory in the US? I mean, I think we have the ability to layer, right, stories that that they're already out there. And I guess I'm more of a palimpsest of layers. I don't like, you know, these binaries because, you know, nothing really exists that way. It's much more complex. But I would rather, you know, instead of, you know, marking a special site to say something happened here going to the place where it happened. So if Black folks built the White House, when I'm out in front of the White House looking at it, I should be reminded that Black folks built the White House. And I don't know how we do that, but that should just be part of that reminder. It's like when I go to an important building, there's a stone that says when it was built, you know, something that forces us again to layer thing so I can look at a building and say, oh, it's a classical building, right? Or I can look at a site and say, you know, it's a historic site. But now once I say who inhabited that site and how they inhabit it, it changes how I actually see. And right now the way we do these things are we put them over to the side, right? So you have to actually remember that you read something somewhere when you get to the thing to experience, right? And so, you know, places like I'm thinking of Monticello, right? They're struggling with this right now, right? Monticello, they redid Mulberry Row with the slave houses are and, you know, it's kind of nice, right? I mean, the way they did it so that people are like I was there on a tour and they're like, oh, this is not that bad, right? And so in a way, you've got to be very careful, right? And then on the other hand, you know, they're thinking, well, we need to need to create a space so people can decompress. And I'm like, huh, why would you create a space? You've never thought of decompressing. I mean, when I went there and there was no mention of the slaves, no one thought that, hey, black folk need a place to decompress because we're not talking about them, right? And so that's the other way, right? It's the flipping the script. So now that you're talking about this, I just think if the more you layer it, right, the more the story becomes complex and people then can find themselves in the story. Right now, I think people are left out of the story. And so for a lot of us, we're trying to find ourselves, right, in this world and we don't have that many touchstones. And I think if we can give people more touchstones, again, I think the conversations will become even more complex, which I think is more sustainable. I want to get your perspectives on the terms equity and justice. And as you know, this plenary session is part of the National Preservation Conference's equity and justice track. And I'm curious how you define equity and historic preservation and justice and historic preservation. Do you see them as as being individual strategies or one in the same? I think equity and justice, I think they need each other, right? I mean, on one hand, you know, I can talk about equity as it relates to if I take two communities that they have the same thing, but they're given the same thing. But I would also like to think that people are viewed in the same way and we know that's not the case, right? And so that's where justice comes in, right? And to me, justice is really about finding that truth, right? And finding that truth is you've got to deal with it, right? You've got to deal with, you know, what happened yesterday? You've got to deal with, you know, all of these things. And by the time you bring them together, you I think you'll arrive at a different place. We worked on a building here in Bayview Hunters Point. It's and it's a building's old, like 130 years old, right? It's an old opera house. It was done in the suburbs before the blocks were pushed, you know, south of San Francisco, you know, by the mid 60s, it had become pretty much Bayview had become a black neighborhood through redevelopment and this historic building kind of set there. And over time, it became this unique element. It became a theater that taught, you know, drama and music and things like that. But slowly it became paternalistic because, you know, the bureaucracy looking at it was like they didn't see it as a historic building per se, but they saw that it was a place where this group of people needed to be taken care of, right? And so instead of thinking that maybe culture will take care of them, things like community gardens, you know, all of that paternal, those tropes that come into our neighborhood. And in a way, the building was almost diminished in its, right? It's, it's, it's reverie of being old. And so when we came in, the first place someone took us was under the building. And they talked about this rock that the building set on, which they related it back to the Alonis, the natives. And they were very proud of that, right? And that inspired us to really talk about all these histories, right? And get rid of all these stuff and return it back to a theater, you know, all of these things. And we use all of these stories. The reason why I'm telling you this, we use all these stories. When we had to go through historic preservation, we were then able to do something pretty radical to an old building because I think we had a great layered story to talk about, right? And we put in these modern floating ramps around the building to make one elevation so that you can move around the entire building. So it's new against that kind of old Victorian. And to see these little beautiful black kids come there every day, man, to like dance, it's just wonderful, because that's where you have empathy and justice happening simultaneously. And they're very proud of the building. And, you know, I mean, I was just talking to one of my students who went over and was doing the evaluation the other day. The caretaker there is from Oakland, big brother, right? He's going to get me from talking about him. But the whole time we were doing the project, and this goes back to my earlier statement, he kept saying, Walter. Why are you putting all this energy into this, man? They're just not going to take care of it. You know, that mentality of like being in a place and seeing it that way. He's like, oh, man, this is nice wood. You're doing this nice wood. Oh, man, they're not going to take care of it. Oh, man, you're putting in beautiful metal. Oh, man. Being opened up, he came up and shook my hand. And then when my student went over, she mentioned my name and he let her in, you know. And so again, they're very proud. That's my point is that through that process, you know, to see that kind of proudness of that history and taking care of something, you know, that's really different. That's valued. It's just it's another just blows your mind. Let's talk about the future. What's your vision? Let's take 10 years from now. What's your vision for the U.S. Historic Preservation Movement and Profession? Wow, that's a good one. 10 years from historic preservation. Well, one, I don't know what's going on right now. I think there's a lot of reactionary planning happening right now, and I don't know where we're going to land. And what I mean by that, you know, from last year, the kind of, how can I say, record number of memories taking down in the landscape. And I'm going to be vague about that, right? That every every narrative that people could chip at in the last year has been chipped, right? And again, I think for me in a decade, I would like to see us figure out again, this the multiplicity of memory, the multiplicity of history. I mean, I'm more of that and I know it's very generational because I know younger, more millennials, they want everything out of the way. But for me, I want to live in a world where there's palimpsest, where there are old things around me that tell multiple stories, where people that talk about multiple lives, so that if I go to, let's say, a building that's 200 years old, I'm able here to understand the traumas of Black life, but also the progress of Black life. I'm also understanding the trauma of white life and the progress of white life. All of these things are kind of tied together. And I think if we kind of focus on the stuff in the middle versus the stuff at the extremes, that might allow us to actually have a very interesting, how can I, set of ruins in our lives, right? And these ruins are sometimes are just there for us to reflect, but sometimes they're there for us to inhabit in a very different way and to become. Because in a way, the ruins are the projections for tomorrow to a certain degree, if you think about it. They set the tone of how we can imagine the world. And so that's what I would say in a decade. I would just want there to be more cross-cultivation of what's important in our collective memory. You know, I'm mindful that you are a busy man with many jobs, so you've got your own firm and you are leading in practice, but you also have one foot inside of academia. And you and I both share that duality in our careers. And I would even say it's, at least personally, it feels like a responsibility, a social responsibility to train the next generation of leaders. Why are you devoting some of your time at UC Berkeley as a professor in the Landscape Architecture Department? Why am I devoting my time to teaching, particularly at UC Berkeley? You know, teaching was something I never set out to do, right? I mean, I always thought I was going to be in practice, but when I came to Berkeley to get my master's degree in architecture and landscape architecture, I just had this renaissance. I got to a place where I had gone through my undergrads, where I worked in the profession, in the kind of the institutional world, park service, private practice. I felt I had done all of that. And then when I came out west, being an east coaster, it was almost this amazing freedom to learn unfettered versus, you know, on the east coast, it's a little different. Right? I mean, I was privy to a lot of things when I came out here, right, in the late 80s. And those things opened my eyes, and they made me want to learn more. And as I started to learn more, I actually figured out that I had something to say, right? I mean, and figuring out that you have something to say, teaching then gave me a framework in which to try to develop what I wanted to say. I mean, I knew I wanted to say, I just didn't know what I wanted to say. And my first decade of teaching gave me this context, you know, going through tenure, doing research to figure out how I wanted to practice and how I wanted to teach. And, you know, it was really tough because, you know, the 90s was like multiculturalism, you know, riots, you know, the 90s was almost like 2020, if you think about it, spread out over a decade. So it was a very interesting time to, you know, be in California, but also to be in academia. And, you know, 20 years later, it feels like being around youth and seeing generational change has also been very valuable to my growth. Plus, I could imagine, you know, if I wasn't around that generational change all the time, you get set in your ways. And teaching forces me every year that I'm confronted with a different group of students who, you know, are just from a different time. And that forces me to change. And I've really seen that transformation, you know, in my work, in my teachings, and also in how I think about the world. So I think these two, it's almost teaching allows me to be oral, to think orally, basically. So I'm not at home talking in a mirror. You know, you can get your thoughts out there in the world unencumbered, right? And you could have that critique and dialogue, which is different than the professional world, right? You have to take more care in the professional world. What about your experience with the Lowe Fellowship at Harvard? When I think of just the number of Lowe Fellows that are historic preservation practitioners, it's just a handful of us. And I would love to see more colleagues have sabbaticals in the space to contemplate their own career, but everything that you just described, what was your experience like? Well, it's interesting. I just did a Lowe Fellowship in the spring, but that's a senior fellowship. And I've never been a Lowe Fellow. I've just been on juries to select Lowe Fellows. And I was teaching at Harvard and they kind of indoctrinated me. And I know a lot of Lowe Fellows. So it's kind of an interesting relationship that I've never been part of their club, but I'm part of their club. And I think you're right. It's like, I think it's a wonderful gift for people, everyone that I've met come into contact with, who are at a point in their life. And this is what I was getting at with teaching, where you're just given this period of time and resources where you can take the things that you have and kind of just take a step back and reimagine a different way to move. And being around really smart people and being at Harvard, a great place of resources, it only empowers. And you can sort of see people who've left the Lowe by just saw a Lowe Fellow yesterday on a Zoom call, who's doing wonderful work here on transforming incarceration and those kinds of things. And so it's a wonderful program. And if anyone, people don't know about it, they should look into it. So I've got two more questions for you. One is, what's your dream project? A dream project that connects the multiplicity of narratives in one shared landscape. Wow. I just did this installation at MoMA. It was called Black Towers, Black Power. That's my dream lens. And it's 10 buildings, tall buildings. Imagine through the genesis of black inventors who patented what I call mundane objects, paired with the 10 points of the Black Panther movement. That's my project. Oh, it's a futuristic project. It's a crazy project. So you have to look it up. It's something that I wanted to do. It's a fiction. And I wanted to do it because it's a critique on a landscape that I live in. And I use these black inventions as a way to talk about, again, bringing these memories that most of us don't know, that the sugar, pencil eraser, a bicycle, a dirigible. A, I mean, you go on and on a dustpan. All of these kind of mundane elements of labor are attributed to people of color. But we don't know that. And so for me, marrying that with a larger set of ideas about how to construct a set of cultural landscapes was a critique against a lot of the social service non-profits who are much more paternal. And I use this term paternalism because it's, again, people getting in the way of saying, I know what's best for you. Versus trying to understand me and then working with me to create a different future. And so in a way, it kind of pushes back at this notion that black folk can't live in high-rises, that we can't have high-end development in our communities because it just gets rid of us. But it's all of these fictions that we're told. It kind of challenges those things. And those are the projects that I want to do in the future. Those that challenge the assumption that we can't live in beautiful spaces because they'll get gentrified. This is a thing that we've actually started drinking that kool-aid. And that's not sustainable. That's only going to allow us to basically perish. And so this notion that I want beauty in my landscape. I want commerce. I want diversity. I mean, I want one of the things that we were talking about with Black Tower, Black Power is like, okay, just give me one millionaire per tower. I just need 10 black millionaires. But we don't think in that way. Other developers are coming into our places, but it doesn't take much. Just give me $120 million. And hey, we could create this amazing thing. And that's nothing these days when you think about it. So the last question for you, Walter. Is what advice do you want to leave with the historic preservation profession? The advice I would leave with the historic preservation is history is messy. And I do think the better way to leave a legacy and have an understanding of cultural sites, cultural landscapes is to allow them to be messy, to allow them to be complex. And to have faith that people are intelligent. And I know we can be critical about that at times, but just have faith in the intelligence of people that by giving them that information in wonderful ways for them to allow to kind of see something, it could be just really powerful. And don't do it in a reactionary way. I mean, because you've seen like, okay, we can't have weddings and plantations anymore. Okay, we got to like do this thing on a plantation where we have to like just talk about slaves, but we'll do it at the end of the tour. Or something bad happened here. Well, let's just put a sign up over there. Right? I mean, that's reaction versus trying to like say, okay, how do we come together with this and tell this complex story? And maybe we just need more voices to help us. And maybe we have to get out of the way of keeping something stuck in time. Because that's my view of historic preservation in this country. It chooses a time and it just stops it. Right? Versus saying it's of its time and look at all of these other things. Right? That came out of its time. And choose ways in which, you know, to tell them powerful ways. I was taken by, is it the, what's the museum down in the Tenant Museum? Right? I don't know if you saw this piece where they discovered that there was an African-Americans who lived in tenement. So they then had to, they've just recently restored a tenement to tell that story. They've had the Tenement Museum all along and never told that story. Right? And so again, it just makes it, I think, more powerful. Because for years, I, you know, in even thinking of architectural history and you go through those images of the tenement and all those social studies, they never talk about black folk. They always talk about the Italians. But we were there too. We were all down there together. And so I just think it makes it richer. Walter, I want to thank you for a stimulating discussion and provocative interview. I just want to close with words from Black Landscapes Matter, which you wrote in the afterword. People should see that they themselves and landscapes have multiplicities. We should be moving through space that constantly reminds us that women are equal. That we owe responsibility to natives who were here beforehand. That black hands built our landscape. Having landscapes with multiplicities forces us not to reconcile to see that maybe all these forces are irreconcilable. And that's okay. I want to thank you for leading the change, sharing your voice with us today and helping our nation value the link between landscapes, cultural heritage, and equality. Thank you, Walter. Thank you so much, Brent. I look forward to seeing you in person and having longer discussions about what I think is, you know, a place that we just need collective voices to just keep pushing this work along. All right, great. Thank you so much. All right. I'll see you.