Designing for people
A conversation with Academy Award-winning designer, Hannah Beachler
In May, Reimagining the Civic Commons held a virtual studio to connect practitioners and community leaders from around the country with each other. The goal: understand and work through the challenges and opportunities present at this unique moment in time for the public realm, and to gain inspiration from those doing the work to reimagine civic assets. The keynote was Hannah Beachler, the prolific film and television production designer who crafts unique, emotional landscapes for compelling stories. In 2019, Beachler became the first African American to win an Academy Award for the production design of the film Black Panther; among many other things, she has also designed worlds for Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award-winning film Moonlight, Ryan Coogler’s film Fruitvale Station and Beyonce’s feature-length film and album companion piece Lemonade.
Beachler joined us while working on the production design for Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever and was interviewed by Lynn Ross, founder & principal of Spirit for Change Consulting and member of the Reimagining the Civic Commons Steering Committee on behalf of Knight Foundation. This version of their conversation has been edited and condensed.
Lynn Ross [LR]: While you are imagining Wakanda, you are doing work in a very real place — Atlanta. Like so many U.S. cities, the drivers for land use patterns in Atlanta were the forces of colonization, slavery, economic instruments rooted in white supremacy. Wakanda has none of those drivers and is instead a place centered on Black joy, Black ritual, Black culture and it is inherently safe for Black people. In the absence of redlining and white supremacy, what were the drivers that lead to Wakanda and the Golden City?
Hannah Beachler [HB]: World-building Wakanda and the Golden City was about giving people agency over their resources. That was the first conversation about what Wakanda is; the second conversation was about truth. It’s a radical notion, especially these days. Once you start being honest about your surroundings…and the world, and history, then you can acknowledge what’s happening in a real way. You can have a huge introspective moment. Then you can start to approach world-building.
I had to come to terms with my own history as an African American, as a Black woman in the world, in order to envision things as they could be, and as I didn’t want them to be.
Then you start asking questions about people. Who are they? What do they need? Where did they come from? What can the land do for them and what can they do for the land?
These are the big factors involved with creating a world at that level. Before I get to architecture, before I get to how the city is laid out, I need to understand what’s necessary, what’s needed. How do we serve the environment? How do we serve technology? What is technology’s place in the environment? In our cities, in our lives?
Specifically, in creating Wakanda, I had to ask: what is colonization and what did it do to the continent? What are the factors on a macro scale like mining, building dams, the death of the textile industry? What did these things do to the environment, to water sources, to crops? Some countries put out the least amount of climate emissions while they are also experiencing the worst impacts of climate change.
All this process always leads back to people. That’s a big deal.
The tenets that I follow for world-building on every project are those of a protopian society. We’re talking family, community, ritual, tradition and food. Oftentimes food is forgotten when we think about communities. That’s why we have so many foodless parks, foodless streets. We don’t have fruit trees in our communities because it’s not convenient for the city to clean up after them.
I had a very strange upbringing. I grew up in the woods. We lived off the land until I was 10 or 13. I had great respect for that lifestyle. I can remember being 8 or 9 and my mother would say “Get out of the house; don’t come back ’til dinner.” She would feed us on the porch and then off we would go. There was never a moment when I went hungry because I was climbing a neighbor’s pear tree. We were outside all day but we were sustained, and we were okay.
We need to ask how food plays a part in how we design spaces inequitably, especially now. When you are designing, you need to go in reverse, to un-do what has been done. When you think of communities and cities, un-doing is a really hard thing to do. With Wakanda, I was doing something that hadn’t been done yet; I was building a place that does not exist. I wasn’t trying to work out of the negative — it was more additive.
[LR]: What were you hoping the audience of Black Panther would emotionally experience when they first see Wakanda and the Golden City?
[HB]: Honestly, I was just hoping people would go see the movie. Honestly — and this might sound awful — I didn’t really think about the audience because I knew I needed to serve the place, I needed to do right by the story, I needed to do right by the continent. I wanted to undo stereotypes and clichés, I wanted to give this place agency and autonomy. I hoped that people would see all of that thinking and effort within these designs. That this was a place that had sustained itself for 10,000 years. A place that has a circular economy, that serves communities. And that keeps the tenets of a protopian society in mind.
I was hoping that people would want to go see the movie and see that I was doing right by the environment and the world. At one point in my year of working on the movie, when I was in another country or traveling, people would ask me “Where are you from and what do you do?” and I would answer “Wakanda. I’m an architect in Wakanda.” To do my work, I had to believe that this place existed and that I was a person who lived there. I had to transform myself in order to do the work. I wanted people to see that all the details — the land, the language, the script — were thoughtful and meaningful.
[LR]: You have an extraordinary ability to tell stories through design. Can you talk a bit about your process in telling new stories and more nuanced stories about things that really happened?
[HR]: For Fruitvale Station, that was the first time I met Ryan Coogler. It was a beautiful script; it made me cry. I had to put it down and pick it up again later because it was hard to get through. I started looking at Oakland and some of the tape of Oscar’s execution. It served me that I was not from the West Coast and so I could see it differently; my perspective was from a different side of the building as it were. I looked at the colors that were predominant there (in Oakland), I looked at the style of buildings that were predominant and I started thinking about that fateful day for Oscar since that was what the movie was about. What was he seeing? What did he react to? How can I see his day from a different perspective?
It’s always about the place telling the story for me. The place is the background, the paint on the canvas of the story. I find different ways to push up against the narrative of the script, and sometimes to join in with the narrative. With Moonlight, I really wanted to push up against that storytelling because you see the movie in three parts. I wanted to portray Miami in way you don’t often see it in film — instead of seeing the movie Birdcage, instead of neon, instead of Lamborghinis, instead of Kardashians and instead of Tom Ford and Gucci, I wanted the other side of Miami. When I visited, we shot in Liberty City where I saw a different side of Miami and wanted that for the movie. What struck me about Liberty City were these beautiful pastel colors in the projects, places neglected and ignored by the city, where people were struggling and put in a box as to who they were. I wanted to push up against that.
It was a lot about giving “Little” potential (editor’s note: the film’s main character, Chiron, is shown at three stages of his life, with “Little” being the first). Every young Black child, every young person of color has potential. You see Little in soft colors, you see pinks, you see pastels, what we generally think of Miami. As Little gets older those colors start to drain out. By the time we reach “Black,” the third part of the story, you get beiges. He’s in Atlanta, not Miami. The colors do come back by the end of the movie when Chiron goes back to Miami.
That’s how I told the story, visually, of so many kids in so many places whose potential gets cut off at the knees due to legislation, zoning, redlining. Places where your zip code becomes who you are, what you can do, where you can go, how far you get — despite having all the potential in the world. And I also wanted to show our inner potential, how our families are, what their circumstances are. How does their potential get cut off at the knees? I start with the story and do a deep dive to discover what that world wants to be.
[LR]: I want to shift gears and talk about typologies. This past year, lots of communities have been forced to think differently about spaces. However, there are still some typologies that exist — a library has tables, chairs and stacks; a recreation center has a basketball court. What is your advice for pushing beyond those typologies and creating a bold future for our public spaces?
[HR]: That is a hard question. Everybody wants to push the envelope and create something that lends strength to lifting young people up, but getting past the idea that “it’s always been this way” is like getting past a wall. If you want to create a space for young people, we need to think about the things they need in a non-linear way. At the end of the day, it’s how you pitch things and how you get people on board that counts, which is hard. It’s always fighting for the things we want.
As soon as you said rec center I started thinking about a big net on the second floor of a library. There are no chairs and kids get to open their paper books and sit and read in different positions. They can climb the net and accomplish something. How do we get to that? How do we get to a point where we make it tactile, we make it rewarding? Sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 grinds you down, and that’s how we’re teaching kids — to sit at a desk, eat lunch, get to work. How do we break that shell and allow kids and others to be who they are? I’m a mother of a 23-year-old and part of being a mother is allowing your child to shine and then enhancing whatever makes them shine. How do we break the mold that we are following so kids and people can shine?
We also need to allow ourselves to do these things as adults. The people designing public spaces need to be introspective because that’s when you are able to break the mold. It’s hard to break the mold, but we have to tell the truth about how it is. We all had wants and needs when we were young and things have changed and shifted, so why can’t design change and shift? Why is there an expectation that it stays the same?
Allowing ourselves to be human is important — you cannot undergo major surgery and miss one day in the office and then come right back into the office to work. We cannot do that to ourselves anymore. The pandemic has shown us that. We have to allow ourselves grace. We have to be human again. We have to learn how to love people again. Trust is a big issue. As a Black woman, I do not feel safe in certain spaces. That’s the truth and not an easy one. There are some people who have had experiences that I don’t understand, but I have to understand those different experiences. I may not like them, I may not agree with them, but if I’m going to create for people, they are included in that too, whatever that might be.
I can only love someone else as much as I love myself. Then I can do for others what I do for me — stay healthy, stay active and continue to create. When we’re able to do that for others, then we change the typology. We change the way everyone thinks about everything.
The one last thing I want to say is: design is everywhere. Design rules everything we do. We design trains and we design when they come, and design dictates when you go to work, how you get to work, where you stand in the station. Design dictates everything! It dictates how I feel when I get on the subway, when I get on the bus. Why do I have to look at the back of someone’s head while I ride — why not a bus where we’re in the round? Then I can see you, see your face. I want to be in an elevator where I don’t have to go to the corner, but I can actually look at somebody, engage with them. I’m a talker and I will just talk to people on the street anytime.
Force yourself to engage. If you’re in the grocery store and you see somebody wearing something you like, talk to them. You will be surprised by the conversation. You will learn something about somebody — where they live, their needs and wants. I do this all the time, and when you do it, you can form yourself to break the typology.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
