Lecture: Sekou Cooke

February 19, 2018 - 5:30 PM
UNC Charlotte Center City, Room 1104

Jamaican born Sekou Cooke is Principal, sekou cooke STUDIO, and an assistant professor at Syracuse University. His lecture is titled "Hip-Hop Architecture: Theory and Practice." This lecture is FREE and open to the public.

Hip-hop would not exist if not for architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Not DJ Kool Herc. Not The Sugarhill Gang. Not Crazy Legs. Not even Cornbread. The true father of hip-hop is Moses. The tyrannical, mercilessly efficient head of several New York City public works organizations, Robert Moses did more in his fifty-year tenure to shape the physical and cultural conditions required for hip-hop’s birth than any other force of man or nature. 

Robert Moses's grand vision for the city indifferently bulldozed its way through private estates, middle-class neighborhoods, and slums. His legacy: 658 playgrounds, 28,000 apartment units, 2,600,000 acres of public parks, Flushing Meadows, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, all interconnected by 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges. Ville Radieuse made manifest, not by Le Corbusier, the visionary architect, but by “the best bill drafter in Albany." 

This new urbanism deepened the rifts within class and culture already present in post-war New York, elevated the rich to midtown penthouses and weekend escapes to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley, and relegated the poor to crowded subways and public housing towers—a perfect incubator for a fledgling counterculture.