Hip-Hop Architecture

The book hip-hop architecture deserves—and the one our era of reckoning demands. * Metropolis *
This compelling book simultaneously challenges an inherent elitism (and whiteness) in contemporary architectural theory and practice, and embraces and expands the scholarly vocabulary of the canon. * Library Journal *
Hip-Hop Architecture is a call for building design to be instated as the fifth pillar of this cultural movement, joining dance, drama, fine arts and music… As idiosyncratic, challenging and genre-redefining as Hip-hop’s other cultural manifestations, Cooke’s book argues for a new approach to urban design that better expresses the Black and African American experience. * Wallpaper* *
Cooke's book reminds us how what has been built to date is the result of the application of political, social and cultural ideas and principles that have intentionally excluded certain sections of the population. Architecture is the manifesto of this exclusion and, over time, becomes testimony of the errors of a society that should no longer belong to us. So the author starts from hip-hop to get to the maximum systems, because hip-hop is a culture that binds people, unites them in community, through music, sounds, dances. Its pages describe and reflect the values of a culture linked by sound and words. * Elle Décor Italia *
Well-researched, engaging and fresh ... [Cooke] strips the paternalizing aspects off, which often pervade the treatises emanating from the ivory towers of academia. * Scene Point Blank *
Hip-Hop Architecture is a meditation on architecture’s intersection with one of the most influential contemporary cultural movements—hip-hop. Cooke’s deft textual and visual riffs merge hip-hop’s sonic and performative modalities—remix, breakdance, graffiti—with traditions and practices that inform black spatiality and design. * Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University, USA *
Cooke’s Hip-Hop Architecture is presented at exactly the time we need a new way to think about form, space, surface, construction, renovation, cities, activism, and the power of a cultural moment that has reshaped the planet. But don’t call this book timely—call it brave, urgent, phresh, and a book that reflects a perspective that the discipline of architecture has needed for a long time. * Ronald Rael, University of California-Berkeley, USA *
Hip-Hop Architecture makes the most compelling argument to date for an emerging movement in architecture defined by modalities of practice—deejaying, emceeing, breakdancing, and graffiti writing—rather than by reference to the Western architecture canon. * Michael Speaks, Dean, Syracuse University School of Architecture *
As the creative world begins to face its racist legacy, Cooke’s book reflects on the ways in which spaces are created to exclude or include, and the potential of Hip-Hop Architecture to create buildings, spaces, and urban environments that are more inclusive and empowering to the underrepresented and marginalized. * Design Miami *