Glass House Presents: Sekou Cooke and Hip Hop Architecture

This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of Hip Hop, and we are proud to celebrate this milestone with a presentation by Sekou Cooke on the cross-section of music and architecture.

Sekou Cooke is an architect, urban designer, researcher, and curator. Born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, North Carolina, he is the Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte, the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. The work of sekou cooke STUDIO is centered on the exploration of Hip-Hop Architecture: an approach to contemporary design that embraces hip-hop culture and applies its shape, structure, and ideologies to the built environment.

Cooke is a leading advocate for the study and practice of Hip-Hop Architecture, which addresses the broad impacts of the racist history of architecture and urban planning, opening a pathway for practice, education, and scholarship that embraces architecture as a tool for shaping, reflecting, and understanding culture. Key recent projects include the forthcoming Syracuse Hip-Hop Headquarters, designs for Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety’s Standard Plan ADU Program, and Grids + Griots, an architectural intervention commissioned for the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The studio has received widespread recognition for its design work including ​​a 2022 Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York. Sekou holds a B.Arch from Cornell University, an M.Arch from Harvard University, and is licensed to practice architecture in New York and North Carolina.

Glass House Presents is an ongoing series of live events that extends the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds. This talk is co-hosted by New Canaan Library and supported in part by the New Canaan Community Foundation.