Exhibition

  • Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture
    Sekou Cooke
    Curator
    Museum of Design Atlanta, Atlanta
    Oct 15, 2022 to May 14, 2023
  • GRANTEE
    Museum of Design Atlanta
    GRANT YEAR
    2022

Gallery view of "Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture", 2022, Atlanta, GA. Courtesy Museum of Design Atlanta. Photo: Gene Phillips

Hip-Hop Architecture is a design movement that embodies the collective creative energies that gave rise to hip-hop music. Its designers produce spaces, buildings, and environments that translate hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form. The Museum of Design Atlanta's exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, includes work by thirty-four participants from across the globe. Their projects include experimental visualizations, installations, façade studies, building designs, and urban development proposals. These projects, created over the past twenty-five years, are part of an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.

Sekou Cooke is an American-Jamaican architect, author, and educator, and is associated with the style of Hip-hop architecture. He is the director of the Master in Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte and principal of sekou cooke STUDIO. Cooke is one of the founding members of the Black Reconstruction Collective.

As the Southeast's only museum dedicated solely to design, Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) defines design as a creative process that inspires change, transforms lives, and makes the world a better place. MODA demonstrates the potential of design as an agent of change through engaging exhibitions, educational programs for children and adults, and special events designed to initiate conversation and community dialogue. MODA’s exhibitions and programs focus on a wide range of design disciplines.