?Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture,? a new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, makes an urgent case for why it can Throughout history, major cultural movements?like the Renaissance, Modernism, and Postmodernism?have expressed themselves through visual art, music, architecture, and dance. When Sekou Cooke, an architect, curator, and professor at Syracuse University, thought about hip-hop, he wondered why it was so prolific in everything except architecture.
?Why is that" Why hasn?t hip-hop created its own architecture" And if it did, what would it look like" If it has, can we find it",? he pondered at the opening of ?Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture,? a new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, in New York. For the past five years, Cooke has been investigating potential answers to those questions and drawing throughlines between manifestos, conceptual projects, constructed work, and scholarly theses in an ambitious undertaking to identify?and define?architecture?s next great -ism. According to Cooke, Hip-Hop Architecture has arrived. But in hailing a countercultural philosophy as the next great mainstream movement in architecture, will the exhibition also hammer a nail in its coffin"

Courtesy Center for Architecture
Olalekan Jeyifous?s 2015 project ?Shanty-Megastructures? explores adding contemporary infrastructure and architecture to bustling Lagos, Nigeria.

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