Professionals and experts in the areas of hip hop, visual art and architecture will gather in Slocum Hall from 5–7 p.m. on Thursday and 9 a.m. – 7 p.m. on Friday for a free-to-attend symposium on the intersection of hip-hop ideas and architecture.

The symposium, titled “Towards a Hip-Hop Architecture,” is being hosted by Syracuse University School of Architecture faculty and the Society of Multicultural Architects and Designers, or SMAD. The event is among the first of its kind.

“It’s really about learning to look at architecture in a different way,” said Valentina Parada, vice president of SMAD and a sophomore architecture major. “It’s like when you learn a new language, you get a different perspective on something.”

The connection between hip-hop and architecture is partly ideological, said Austin Adams, a sophomore architecture major. For example, he said the ideas of rap remix can be compared to the way modern architecture tries to renovate and repurpose spaces.

However, the link goes much deeper than that, Adams said.

“Hip hop was derived from architecture,” he said. “It’s in the way that the public housing projects of Brooklyn, the Bronx, St. Louis and such shaped the environments of early hip-hop.”

These concepts have been promoted by Professor Sekou Cooke, the symposium’s primary organizer and an assistant professor of architecture. Cooke has written articles describing the concepts of hip-hop architecture for publications such as ArchDaily.com, Architect Magazine and The Harvard Journal of African-American Planning Policy.

“Those project buildings were the environment in which underrepresented minorities created a new creative process, a new identity,” Cooke added.

“The symposium’s goal is to gather minds together and ask how we can reread projects and structures to see how they might relate back to hip-hop,” Cooke said.

The symposium will open at 5 p.m. on Thursday for an introduction and opening remarks preparing the symposium’s attendees for Friday, Cooke said. Friday will consist of four sessions that will each feature a lecture and panel on the Theory of Hip-Hop Architecture, Visual Art in Hip-Hop, Hip-Hop’s History with Architecture and Hip-Hop Architecture in Practice, respectively.

Among the speakers at the symposium are professionals well versed in the conversation on hip-hop architecture. Guest speaker and professor Craig Wilkins of the University of Michigan wrote a book discussing “hip-hop architectural solutions” to inequality in urban areas called “The Aesthetics of Equity,” and SU architecture professor Lawrence Chua has also written on the topic, Cooke said.

The symposium comes at a time when a broader cultural movement influenced by hip-hop is affecting dance, film, music and fashion traditions worldwide, Cooke said. Hip-hop architecture’s central themes are inspired by hip-hop culture’s drive for creative and open-minded innovation, Cooke and members of SMAD said.

“Architecture, as part of an era’s culture, must respond in some way,” Cooke said. “The discipline of architecture is searching for a new identity.”

Published on March 19, 2015 at 12:01 am

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