Thanks to Melissa Goldstein, Shayan Asgharnia and Damaris Garcia for words, photos and styling.
?I?m obsessed with posting something you?ve never fucking seen ? or, something you?ve seen, but I get to recontextualize it,? says Jerald Cooper, founder of the creative studio Things We?ve Made, and the man behind the Instagram account HOOD CENTURY. ?The latter is almost more powerful than the former, because it opens your mind.? It was that sort of epiphanal moment that inspired him to start the 20k-strong account, whose tagline attests: ?Yes, there is mid-century modern design in the hood!?
Courtesy of Jerald Cooper \ HOOD CENTURY \ Photo by Alister Mori
Cooper, who is in his mid 30s, had been working in the music industry (first managing Jay Z?s audio engineer Young Guru for a decade, then signing British R&B star Ama Lou to Interscope), and was fresh off a breakup, when he flew from Los Angeles to his native Cincinnati last fall. Living in the Californian mecca of mid-century architecture on-and-off for the past 15 years meant that his real estate radar was sharply attuned: ?I was literally walking to the top of my childhood street, and just looked at this mid-century modern dead-on, and I was like: I don?t think people know about that!? Courtesy of Jerald Cooper \ HOOD CENTURY
What began as an experiment has since turned into a full blown preservation movement (complete with collectible merch like coffee table architectural flashcards to be released this October). Posts...