COURTESY UNC CHARLOTTE

Sekou Cooke is UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program director.

UNC Charlotte’s new Master of Urban Design program director is a student of hip hop architecture.

Sekou Cooke joined the program ahead of the fall semester, but his dive into hip hop architecture began in 2013 with rapper Kanye West. He wrote “Keep Talking Kanye: An Architect's defense of Kanye West,” saying he hoped West’s interest in architecture would inspire Black men to pursue architecture, as well as their acceptance by peers.

“I am tripping over myself with fear and excitement at the prospect of having such a powerful mouthpiece for a generation of black architects and designers who share his frustration and connect with his message,” Cooke wrote. “Why? Because when Kanye West talks, people listen.”

Architecture is a largely white profession. National Council of Architectural Registration Boards’ 2021 NCARB by the Numbers reports 2% of architects are Black, while 84% are white.  

“Someone with his level of popularity among the Black community may start to inspire young kids to go into architecture, and it actually has since then,” Cooke said of West’s influence.

Cooke’s piece received a fair amount of attention. The Jamaica native, who holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Cornell University and a master’s in architecture from Harvard University, was reminded of his time at Cornell.

“We were talking about this idea of hip hop architecture,” said Cooke, who attended Cornell in the 1990s.

Nathan Williams, who attended Cornell a few years prior to Cooke, wrote his undergraduate thesis on hip hop architecture, which earned him the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal awarded to the Cornell student with the best undergraduate thesis in art and architecture.

“It blew everybody away and everybody wanted to see what the potential of it was after that,” Cooke said. “It took 20 years, but then I decided it was something that was worthy of research again and brought to a more academic level. Then I started writing about it.”

Cooke wrote “The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip-Hop Architecture.” He expected his roughly 1,500-word piece to be the beginning and end of his dive into hip hop architecture.
“I just had these ideas, and I wanted to get them on paper,” Cooke said.

However, the response was too strong to leave it alone. He brought in experts on the subject for a two-day symposium at Syracuse University where he was teaching. Once again, Cooke intended to let the subject go after the symposium.  

“That symposium really left me with more questions than answers and really proved there was a lot more depth to the topic that was worthy of deep research,” he said.

As Cooke started on the tenure track as a professor, he dedicated the next six years of his life to studying hip hop architecture. It resulted in an exhibition “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture” at the Center for Architecture in New York in late 2018 and early 2019, which he curated and designed. Another version of the exhibition traveled to Minnesota and will also go to Washington, D.C. and Atlanta in 2022. It led him to write a book, “Hip-Hop Architecture,” which was released earlier this year.

Road to Charlotte
Cooke spoke with UNC Charlotte’s Nadia Anderson, an associate professor of architecture and urban design and director of the City Building Lab at a conference about the relationship between architectural grids and the Black body in the Americas.

“I was talking about how it has really been kind of an oppressive force on the Black body, going back to the slave ship galleys where people are packed into, then housing blocks which are all based on these grids, to prison cells and prison blocks based on grids with Nadia Anderson,” Cooke said. “We wrote an academic paper together about grids. That inspired me to use some of that work in the book as well.”

Anderson reached out to Cooke about an open position at Charlotte, where Cooke had previously visited as a guest lecturer as part of the university’s symposium. He decided to investigate based on his familiarity with the program and city. Now he has his sights set on making it one of the preeminent urban design programs in the nation.

“That means taking a lot of what exists already that is good and reshaping it, reframing it, reformatting into something that has a very singular, clear direction and is able to have a very clear identity as a program in terms of what it is interested in,” Cooke said. “Primarily that interest should be the city of Charlotte...it’s been such a fast growing city for so many years, and the effects of that are very evident on the physical landscape. I want the program to really use Charlotte as its urban laboratory.”

Off campus
Cooke established his private practice in 2008 in San Francisco, which he continued when he moved to Syracuse in 2010 and has been in practice since. Cooke, who moved to west Charlotte in July, is licensed to practice in New York and North Carolina and has an office space in NoDa. Cooke is also the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

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