#78/Hip-Hop Architecture: Sekou Cooke

US Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love

Sekou Cooke is a Jamaican-born architect with degrees from Cornell and Harvard who is a assistant professor of Architecture at Syracuse. He is a leading columnist and lecturer advocating for more minorities in architecture. If you think we live in a post-racial era in the profession of architecture, think again. Minorities in 1968 made up only about 1% of the architects in America. 50 years later, we’re up to 2%. Host George Smart spoke with Cooke at the AIA New York Center for Architecture where Cooke has a major exhibition on through January 12 called Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip Hop Architecture. Hip-hop is a cultural movement established by Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s. Hip hop has profoundly affected music and all of the arts. It has emerged not only as an influence on architecture but something bursting to produce its own unique architecture."