Architecture is ever changing, that’s crystal clear. It also takes on some different characteristics that are defined not by structure or function but by cultural shifts that are both readily apparent, and sublimely subtle. This is a great article about such a genre… around HipHop music and culture. Sounds crazy, right? Well… read on.
Image Courtesy ITN Architects, Australia
What is Hip-Hop Architecture?
A textbook definition would read something like this: A design movement embodying the collective creative energies native to young denizens of urban neighborhoods. Its designers produce spaces, buildings and environments translating hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form.
Too stuffy for describing anything related to a culture founded on being un-stuffy.
Understanding Hip-Hop Architecture starts with understanding hip-hop’s encompassing influence on American culture. The influence extends beyond music into language–“slow your roll”–fashion–sneakers–art–graffiti–tech–Beats by Dre–film, sports, dance, everywhere. Hip-hop represents the dominant cultural movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Consciously or unconsciously, Americans engage with hip-hop culture countless times daily. Same goes for architecture.
“Architecture does affect our lives every day, but once we label it architecture, people start to think about Greek temples or Roman basilicas or some Victorian country home; they're not thinking about every single space that they've been in,” Sekou Cooke, a forefather of the Hip-Hop Architecture movement, told Forbes.com. “Every single time they are going to their home or their apartments or going to the bank or walking down the street or going through a city, in one way or another, they are affected by design decisions made by someone else who's trained in one way or another to be an architect or a designer or an engineer.”
Hip-Hop Architecture synthesizes the culture and artform.
“When I talk about Hip-Hop Architecture, I'm talking about the type of cultural influence that hip-hop has, and the type of lifestyle influence that architecture has, and how those two relate to each other and how hip-hop as a culture can actually produce architecture in the same way that all these older more Western cultures have produced architecture,” Cooke said.
See for yourself during “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture,” at the Museum of Design Atlanta through March 12, 2023. “Close to the Edge,” curated by Cooke, exhibits the work of pioneering students, academics and practitioners at the center of this emerging architectural revolution. Projects range across a variety of media and forms of expression including experimental visualization formats and installation strategies, façade studies, building designs and urban development proposals. Collectively, a vision emerges for alternative forms of expression and practice formalizing work created over the past 30 years into an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.