The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip-Hop Architecture

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 f... See more

Hip-hop is a subculture—a movement that comprises an entire generation of performers, artists, thinkers and designers, and began with young urban blacks and Latinos. Even as the art forms find acceptance and legitimacy within contemporary culture—in fashion, film, television, literature, poetry, and education—there is a core of hip-hop that preserv... See more

More than anyone else today, Michael Ford has worked tirelessly to find and identify examples of hip-hop influenced architecture and made many arguments to define architecture’s role in hip-hop’s inception. While I call Moses the “true father,” this is a notion first forwarded by Ford, who has routinely coined Le Corbusier and Robert Moses the “For... See more

Hip-hop architecture, in its new definition, will embody the spirit of hip-hop’s birth, and use the tools of the architect to create structures and built environments. It will be practiced by those raised in architecture’s traditions and hip-hop’s realities. It will be both antiestablishment and socially responsible. It will embrace the contradicti... See more