MONDAY  |  NOV 7 | 4 PM  | AB 100

Hip-Hop Architecture proponent Sekou Cooke will speak at Ball State at 4 p.m. Nov. 7, 2022, in Architecture Building Room 100. His studio work is centered on contemporary design that embraces hip-hop culture and applies its shape, structure, and ideologies to the built environment, and his visit is part of the Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning’s ongoing guest lecture series.

Mr. Cooke’s research practice centers on the emergent field of Hip-Hop Architecture, a theoretical movement reflecting the core tenets of hip-hop culture with the power to create meaningful impact on the built environment and give voice to the marginalized and underrepresented within design practice. This work has been explored through his writings, exhibitions, lectures, and symposia. It is the subject of his monograph Hip-Hop Architecture, published in April 2021, and the 2018 exhibition Cooke curated, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, which was first mounted in 2018 at the AIA Center for Architecture in New York. This exhibition is currently traveling to venues across the US. His work was also featured in the landmark exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, at the Museum of Modern Art in the Spring of 2021.  

BIO

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. 

For more information, contact caplectures@bsu.edu