Hip-Hop Architecture

When hip-hop emerged from the urban renewal in the South Bronx in the 1970’s, the slums in a post-industrialized city experienced residential depopulation and became a space for expression. Schools, parks, and subway cars became performative spaces for rappers, dancers, and graffiti artists. It was originally a vernacular practice. Reappropriation considers working with what’s available and transforming it into a wider aesthetic. As a result, an under-capitalized aesthetic program developed within mainstream consumer culture and encourages a new counter culture. Now that hip-hop has become a mass culture, commercialized, and imposes a form of self-definition. Yet, “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential”. This is the duty of the hip-hop architecture.

Hip-hop architecture must also express struggle; the struggle from power from powerlessness, whether psychologically or materially. Hip-hop is not about nourishing agents already in power, but rather encourages others to create change in their own way, and to make contributions to the world. Hip-hop of this fashion is not about entertainment, although that may be a resulting affect; the goal is to invest more consciousness in communication and meaning. The goal of this architecture is to catalyze an appropriate distribution of power. The way to do this is by evoking design as being ‘politically incorrect’ as a way of endangering the hierarchy and heterarchy by disrupting the legibility of social structure. Alejandro Zaera Polo argues, “rather than rejecting the political in architecture, the attack on political correctness is an attempt to avoid architecture becoming simply a vehicle for political representation to become instead a viable political instrument”. The result of hip-hop architecture is not in form/style, but rather a state of mind (the entrepreneurial spirit, transformation, mash-up, remix, freestyling, etc). Most importantly, hip-hop space is not about creating architecture as a ‘machine’, but rather setting a stage. By considering the relation of body and stage through identity, architecture can be an instrument of cultural production that establishes social and spatial consciousness that encourages others to creatively consider transformation of that space.