Madison architectural designer and Madison College professor Mike Ford ... is involved in a much more positive connection between architecture and hip-hop. He’s the architect for the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx, scheduled to open in 2018. Instead of a top-down design, Ford has brought together minority architects, hip-hop artists, community members and even Madison students together to envision what the museum should be.

How did you get involved with the museum?

That’s an interesting story. It’s a small world. I travel around doing lectures, and these lectures are all about merging culture and architecture. Which is not a new thing. Culture always drives architecture. When I was in school, I said I would merge hip-hop culture with architecture.

I moved from Detroit to Wisconsin, and learned that the UW-Madison has the only fully funded scholarship program for people to come and study hip-hop arts, First Wave. I met (director) Willie Ney. And Willie Ney becomes a board member for the Universal Hip Hop Museum. And he learns they don’t have an architect yet, so it’s been all about collecting memorabilia to that point. So boom, he calls Bob Corbett at Madison College where I was teaching, and Bob said I was the perfect guy with this.

So I went out there and created some concepts for them in a not traditional way.

How so?

I had to stick to my guns, because I’d been going around to all these colleges talking about how architects need to work differently with communities. They need more input from communities, instead of just saying “Here, come to this. We made it.”

So we did this three-day event called a design cypher. In hip-hop they get together and have these cyphers, these circles, with rap battles and dance battles. We said we’d have a design cypher. The museum invited some hip-hop artists around the country, we invited some First Wave students, some Madison College students, and I invited a lot of minority architects. And for three days, it was just coming up with "What should this museum be?" And after three days, we took those concepts and created the first imagery for the museum.