Review of Hip-Hop Architecture

By Robyne Robinson | August 12, 2021

Bloomsbury Visual Arts

BOOK VALUE

Sekou Cooke’s highly anticipated 2019 exhibit “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture” hit the Twin Cities to eager audiences and wide acclaim: A generation weaned on beats and poetry was now challenging the status quo in architecture, making a path for new theories and concepts in design. 

That exhibit has since evolved into a new book by Cooke, simply titled Hip-Hop Architecture. It is equal parts confrontational and unapologetic, like the opening lines of a Henry Miller novel. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Master of Urban Design director blows up accepted academic theoretical models and literally produces the book like an album—as sonic tracks on architecture—establishing the movement’s legitimacy, history, elders, visionaries and prophets, and future. Cooke prods a sleeping dog, pulling the tail that’s been wagging architecture for decades—racism, privilege, unilateral planning, gentrification—and holding it up for the design world to see.

Sekou Cooke speaking at the opening of “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture” at SpringBox in St. Paul in 2019. Photo by Chad Holder.

Like hip-hop’s originators who created an art form out of blight and neglect, Cooke pushes past the negative space left by unrepresentative politics, lack of infrastructure, and outdated architectural dogma and uses visual arts, music, the cultural sights and sounds of urban life, and the unfailing spirit of Black resilience to deconstruct someone else’s idea of space for us and build what Prince liked to call “The New New.”

Cooke does not provide an easy definition of hip-hop architecture. It is collaboration—in musical terms, sampling, remixing, and mashing design into “one cognitive thread: that of common lived experience.” It is the exploration of ontological design: By designing a physical space in an evolving world, we are designing for our conscious states of being.

Although Hip-Hop Architecture presents like a thesis, it is anything but a dry, scholarly read. It’s a design discography filled with lyrics, examples of design work, video stills, global construction, architecture, and lessons in graffiti. Like most albums, some tracks could have benefitted from a stronger collaboration. “Track 5: Gender” acknowledges the deep sexism and misogyny in hip-hop, further complicated by racism, fetishism of Black women, and the current rise of gender and feminist identity in the music. Cooke needs to expand his dialogue with women artists and producers in order to give a fully empowered and inclusionary voice to his manifesto—otherwise, the book and his sonic theory falls short in creating a welcome place at the mixing board for all designers and architects of color.

Purchase from an independent bookstore near you.