Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture

Hip-hop is a cultural movement established by the Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s. 

Over the last five decades, hip-hop’s primary means of expression—deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti—have become globally recognized creative practices in their own right, and each has significantly impacted the urban built environment. Hip-Hop architecture produces spaces, buildings, and environments that embody the creative energy evident in these means of hip-hop expression. 

Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture exhibits the work of students, academics, and practitioners at the center of this emerging architectural revolution

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Olalekan Jeyifous, Surface Armatures, 2014