Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture
October 15, 2022
– May 14, 2023
Hip-Hop Architecture is a design movement that embodies the collective creative energies that gave rise to hip-hop music. Its designers produce spaces, buildings, and environments that translate hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form.
MODA's new exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, includes work by 34 participants from across the globe. Their projects include experimental visualizations, installations, façade studies, building designs, and urban development proposals.
These projects, created over the past 25 years, are part of an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.
Curated and designed by Sekou Cooke
About the Curator
Sekou Cooke is an architect, urban designer, researcher, and curator. Born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, North Carolina, he is the Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte, the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Cooke is a leading advocate for the study and practice of Hip-Hop Architecture, which addresses the broad impacts of the racist history of architecture and urban planning, opening a pathway for practice, education, and scholarship that embraces architecture as a tool for shaping, reflecting, and understanding culture.
As an architectural and urban design practice, sekou cooke STUDIO is grounded in research, emphasizing both broader cultural context, intended use, and improvisational potential of projects. The work of the studio is centered on the exploration of Hip-Hop Architecture: an approach to contemporary design that embraces hip-hop culture and applies its shape, structure, and ideologies to the built environment.
Sekou holds a B.Arch from Cornell University, an M.Arch from Harvard University, and is licensed to practice architecture in New York and North Carolina.