The upside of an exhibition about hip-hop architecture, a movement in its infancy, is that it’s hard to pigeonhole. But it’s also hard to determine what visually brings all the works together.

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Decades after its inception in the playgrounds and block parties of the Bronx, hip-hop has influenced countless corners of American culture including music, visual art, dance, and fashion. However, architect, curator, and Syracuse University professor Sekou Cooke, wondered why architecture wasn’t more prominently featured as part of this picture. As he explained in a phone interview with Hyperallergic: “If all these major creative movements in history, like the Renaissance, Baroque, Post-Modernism, Modernism, had creative products in all these different ways, why did hip-hop not have a creative product that included architecture?”

Cooke spent the past five years exploring this question; the result of his extensive research is Close to The Edge: The Birth of Hip Hop Architecture, now on view at the Center for Architecture. The exhibition brings together 21 architects, artists, academics, and architecture students from all over the world who explore what hip-hop architecture looks like and what it can do for both the people who create it and the communities it exists in.

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