Hip-Hop Architecture comes to Atlanta

A traveling exhibition at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) will survey the origins and development of the now 25-year-old movement that has grown in influence thanks to the work and scholarship of architects like Michael Ford, Craig Wilkins, and the exhibition’s designer and curator Sekou Cooke.

Opening on October 15th, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture includes a range of media such as facade studies, public art commissions, urban development proposals, and even building designs that are tied to the musical genre and cultural phenomenon through a shared love of improvisation, formgiving, style, and community.

Examples from Nina Cooke John, Ujijji Davis, Anthony “YNOT” Denaro, Wilkins, and this year’s Metropolitan Museum rooftop commission artist Lauren Halsey are shown in sonically-enhanced space alongside the designs of creative duos such as PHAT (Nathaniel Belcher & Stephen Slaughter) and SPORTS (Molly Hunker, Greg Corso) to elaborate Cooke’s three categories of Identity, Process, and Image.

In a preview, Cooke told Artnet that his aim as a curator was to showcase “designers with deeply-rooted, hip-hop identities, those committed to processes extracted from hip-hop elements, and reflecting an image that may somehow be tied back to aspects of public consciousness attributed to hip-hop.”

The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Graham Foundation and runs until January 29th at the museum's Peachtree Street location. Ticketing information can be found here.