“Hip hop architect” and professor Mike Ford discusses the community-led vision for the first-of-its-kind museum.
.... some of the [Hip Hop] culture’s leading conservationists are taking over that Bronx courthouse to create a museum dedicated to hip hop—at least, that’s the hope. The building’s owner, Henry Weinstein, is currently working with the Universal Hip Hop Museum’s board of trustees to see if it’s feasible to eventually convert the century-old courthouse into a cultural arts center. One of the UHHM’s founding directors, rapper Kurtis Blow, recruited Mike Ford, a professor who teaches about the intersections of hip hop and architecture at Wisconsin’s Madison College, to lead the museum’s design.
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Ford spoke to CityLab about where the project is headed, and about the importance of reclaiming a building once notorious for locking up youth of color.
How does one go about translating hip hop culture into the language of architecture?
One of the things I’ve done is looking at B-boy and breakdancing, taking something like “the freeze”—where you hold your pose while dancing—and examining how to incorporate that into design. Understand that the freeze is a critical position in [dance] battling—if I can hold that pose, I’m killing you. I call it the structural stability of [breakdancing]. If we can understand that, and then re-create it and scale it up, maybe we could create something architecturally that represents breaking.
Many emcees have rapped about living with bad architecture and living in bad environments. Hip hop is basically the post-occupancy report of modernism [More on this from Ford’s blog]. The biggest thing I take from the emcees is that no one is listening to the communities. That has always been a failure when they’re not actively engaged in the architectural process, and the post-occupancy report proves it. I’m working with community members and hip hop artists to see what style of architecture can best represent every element of hip hop. And also, what’s the best way of listening to hip hop in a museum? Is it a space with high ceilings or low ceilings? Is it concrete, where your voice reverberates? What is the architectural experience that allows the story of the emcee to be told?
If we can understand or really hear the messages from these emcees, you’d realize they have the best post-occupancy report—meaning, their perspectives are coming from the people who’ve had to live with the architectural and urban design decisions made last century. And some of the people behind those decisions are celebrated as the best architects, but they created some of the worst living conditions.
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