Museum of Design Atlanta exhibit adds another element to hip-hop art form

Photo courtesy of MODA

Around the same time that urban designer and architect Sekow Cook first learned of Bankhead from his famous “Bounce,” his alma mater, Cornell University, came up with a new idea to bring hip-hop into dialogue with the architectural field. It was There, Nathan Williams’s 1995 paper on “Hip-Hop Architecture” explores how the genre’s methods work in the cityscapes and built environments of his hip-hop hubs like The Bronx and Bankhead. A survey was conducted to see if it would be essential.

25 years later, in a new exhibition at the Atlanta Museum of Design Near the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, Cook leads the conversation on a gathering of architectural works by 34 architects from around the world. Their installations, which are on display until January 29, include experimental visualizations, development proposals, façade studies, and architectural designs. Each riffs on hip-hop methodology (deejays, emcees, BBoy dances, graffiti, remixes, sampling) to translate hip-hop energy into a constructed form. Among the featured installations is a rendering of Atlanta’s Trap Music Museum. Bankhead is a necessary type of conservationist space, Cook says, located at the entrance to the corridor.

Below, Cook, director of the Masters in Urban Design program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explains how hip-hop can be used as a lens to provoke new architectural ideas.

blueprint Most people think of hip-hop as just a genre of music, but hip-hop is actually a culture. It is the world’s largest and most powerful cultural phenomenon. It shapes what we think about every day more than we realize. Architecture, at its best, should reflect culture. The history of architecture in Europe includes the Baroque, Classical, and Renaissance periods, and there were buildings that reflected each period. Currently a hotbed of hip-hop culture, Atlanta has the potential to become a ground zero for the city-wide implementation of hip-hop architectural ideas.

element Architecture, like hip-hop culture, is not limited to one project type or group of people. It’s really about process and attitude. Can you use processes that are directly derived from hip-hop culture, such as sampling, remixing, and layering? Or do you use traces of things that you may have forgotten or lost? It flows easily into architecture in that it is repurposed in ways it was not designed to be. For example, the exhibit uses a 3D turntable to interactively explore the relationship between hip-hop technology and architectural production.

scope The works on display are organized using three main characteristics: identity, process and image. The first is practitioners who identify themselves with the hip-hop community. The second invokes a method of production using a particular technique or values. And he third, creates products that are recognizable as part of an established aesthetic.

flow Atlanta has many types of neighborhoods and cityscapes rooted in hip hop. It’s not just the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens skyscrapers that are the types of architecture that are immediately associated with his hip-hop culture. But there are also neighborhoods just outside of Atlanta like East Point. And inside Atlanta like Bankhead, an integral part of its identity.

This article appeared in the January 2023 issue.

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