Architecture researcher and practitioner Sekou Cooke is organizing a symposium on what he sees as an imminent and much-needed cultural movement.

The true father of hip-hop remains up for debate—was it Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, or someone else?—as does what hip-hop architecture entails. Cooke, for one, envisions in his essay that the movement will “embody the spirit of hip-hop’s birth … be both anti-establishment and socially responsible … and take a revolutionary stance towards preservation of the public health, safety, and welfare.”

To further the discussion, Cooke is bringing together design researchers and practitioners for Towards a Hip-Hop Architecture, a symposium on March 19 and 20 at Syracuse University. ARCHITECT spoke with Cooke to learn more.

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Untitled No. 6 - Filip Dujardin (Ghent, Belgium, 1971) is an Art Historian (University of Ghent) specialized in Architecture and Photography (Academy of Ghent). He was technical assistant of Magnum-Photographer Carl De Keyzer and collaborated with Frederik Vercruysse.He has published his work in national and international books and magazines, participated in several individual and group exhibitions since 2007, and has collaborated several times with scopio Editorial Line: invited author in the section Projects of scopio magazine aboveground architecture, speaker at the congress ON THE SURFACE: Public Space and Architectural images in debate and invited photographer to integrate the jury of the international photography contest aboveground territory.His significant and inspiring work is mostly characterized by an artistic strategy that uses the tools of digital imaging as an opportunity for a postmodern project that unveils the pretence of photographic objectivity, making us more attentive to the architecture that surrounds us and to where we live and work.Filip Dujardin uses the power of digital manipulation not to mask or denature a profound reality, but to call our critical attention to it, and his work is used, not to blur our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, but to sharpen our critical attitude towards the existing architecture of today. © Filip Dujardin

ARCHITECT: Describe the connection between hip-hop and architecture.

Sekou Cooke: It's a subject that's been talked about and thought about for at least 20 years. In 2009, Craig Wilkins, at the University of Michigan, published The Aesthetics of Equity (University of Minnesota Press). To me, it's almost like a hip-hop architecture instruction manual. He talks about otherness, how spaces are designed for inclusion or exclusion, who is being included or excluded, and the potential of hip-hop architecture to be more inclusive to underrepresented groups. At end of each chapter, he has this section called Remix, where he basically restates the argument using hip-hop slang, or Ebonics, to break down the idea. In this manner, that really connects to the hip-hop generation.

Beyond Craig Wilkins, there's Michael Ford, who has been formulating own ideas about hip-hop architecture. In my opinion, he mistakenly states Le Corbusier is the father of hip-hop, but in the last year or two, his work and arguments have been making the rounds and getting more popular.

More recently is the book Archi.Pop (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), which is about architecture and popular culture. The last chapter, written by Lawrence Chua, covers hip-hop and urbanism, how hip-hop grew out of the Modernist idealized project buildings, and how the architectural context spawned this new movement.

How does architecture fit in with the four elements of hip-hop?

Each major cultural movement had its register in five areas: art, music, theater, dance, and architecture. Somehow in the hip-hop cultural movement, architecture got left out. It’s always been this thing that has been inaccessible to the underclass, the underprivileged. Now that more people in those communities are making their way into architectural practice and academics, this is an opportunity for architecture to stake its claim as the fifth basic element of hip-hop.

What can architects learn from hip-hop? 

Right now, architecture is desperately lacking in diversity, profitability, and pervasiveness; it hasn’t made a dent into popular culture. Frank Gehry might make it into The Simpsons, and Rem (Koolhaas) may make it on the cover of Time magazine, but architects aren't very well known in popular culture. It's still this elite, obscure, marginal thing. What hip-hop is good at is being diverse, being profitable, and being pervasive. If we can embrace hip-hop architecture and learn from those lessons, architecture as a whole can rally itself around a new cultural movement that may make it more relevant in today's society.