"The book hip-hop architecture deserves-and the one our era of reckoning demands." –Metropolis
"Cooke's book reminds us how what has been built to date is the result of the application of political, social and cultural ideas and principles that have intentionally excluded certain sections of the population. Architecture is the manifesto of this exclusion and, over time, becomes testimony of the errors of a society that should no longer belong to us. So the author starts from hip-hop to get to the maximum systems, because hip-hop is a culture that binds people, unites them in community, through music, sounds, dances. Its pages describe and reflect the values of a culture linked by sound and words." –
Elle Décor Italia "
Hip-Hop Architecture is a meditation on architecture's intersection with one of the most influential contemporary cultural movements-hip-hop. Cooke's deft textual and visual riffs merge hip-hop's sonic and performative modalities-remix, breakdance, graffiti-with traditions and practices that inform black spatiality and design." –
Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University, USA "Cooke's
Hip-Hop Architecture is presented at exactly the time we need a new way to think about form, space, surface, construction, renovation, cities, activism, and the power of a cultural moment that has reshaped the planet. But don't call this book timely-call it brave, urgent, phresh, and a book that reflects a perspective that the discipline of architecture has needed for a long time." –
Ronald Rael, University of California-Berkeley, USA "
Hip-Hop Architecture makes the most compelling argument to date for an emerging movement in architecture defined by modalities of practice-deejaying, emceeing, breakdancing, and graffiti writing-rather than by reference to the Western architecture canon." –
Michael Speaks, Dean, Syracuse University School of Architecture
