On a mild afternoon in Washington, D.C., a makeshift stage has formed in the entryway of the District Architecture Center. Middle-schooler Iyana Benjamin adjusts the arms of her gold-rimmed, circular glasses from beneath a gray beanie and smiles as she looks up from her notebook and out to a few rows of folding chairs, accommodating nine other kids and a few adults. A beat emanating from a nearby laptop breaks the silence, and Benjamin begins to rap. She raps in a matter-of-fact yet firm tone on topics that are well beyond her years, from the swift gentrification of her neighborhood to the overshadowed African American architects who first built it.
Benjamin, along with the other middle school students, are part of a weeklong workshop called the Hip Hop Architecture Camp. The program, founded and administered by architectural designer Michael Ford, brings awareness of the built environment to kids who may never have considered their place of upbringing as being a formative part of it. That’s something Ford hopes to change.
For students at the camp, the workshops are opportunities to not just explore a potential career avenue but develop a whole new way of thinking about their cities. Over the course of a week, students watch a lot of hip-hop music videos, but they also reinterpret their lyrics as miniature buildings and explore design at multiple scales. With the aid of volunteers, they then write their own songs (the lyrics of which are featured throughout this piece), jotting down bars in notebooks with a goal of recording them later.
“The benefit of doing this, for architects and urban planners, is being able to communicate with other artists about their skills and bring them into architecture,” Ford says. “As architects, we’ve always been influenced by culture. The Hip Hop Architecture Camp creates some very interesting, cross-disciplinary conversations that I have not had in architecture school.”
Such conversations have been a yearslong pursuit for Ford. His Master of Architecture thesis at the University of Detroit Mercy was on hip-hop–inspired architecture and design. Ford has taken his thesis research as a personal mission by cofounding the Detroit-based Urban Arts Collective, a nonprofit that aims to bring STEAM curricula to underserved communities and the Hip Hop Architecture Camps.
In a 2017 TEDx talk, Ford levels a blistering critique at Modernism. To him, hip-hop is the movement’s post-occupancy report: Corbusian-influenced housing projects became hip-hop’s unwitting antagonists, producing the kinds of rough living conditions that rappers such as Grandmaster Flash, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Nas have been singing about for decades. In the hands of Robert Moses–era planning, Ford posits, Modernism became a tool wielded to define low-income housing: “Le Corbusier was a great architect,” he says, “but his architecture disproportionately affected people of color. Hip-hop brings accountability to Le Corbusier.”
There is no question that architecture has a diversity problem. Just two percent of newly licensed architects are African American, according to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (or NCARB, which also sponsored the D.C. edition of the camp). Only 452 African American women in history have received architecture licenses in the United States. Ford’s approach aims to address the so-called “pipeline problem,” a concept that attributes architecture’s diversity problem to the lack of diversity in architecture schools. The Hip Hop Architecture Camp’s focus on middle school students is to show them—at a young age—that design is a pathway that is open to them. In turn, the program hopes to build up representation at all stages of the profession—from architecture school to professional licensure to firm leadership.
In 2017, Ford launched the inaugural Hip Hop Architecture Camp in Madison, Wisconsin. Its initial workshop was hosted with the city’s planning department and the Madison Public Library, which has hip-hop artist Rob DZ on staff as a full-time artist-in-residence.
“We were trying to come up with the camp’s first song and Rob said, ‘That’s what we’re trying to do: Build it up,’ in casual conversation,” Ford remembers. “Eventually, that became the first song. And then we’ve built upon that, by using ‘Build it Up’ to define everything. We’re trying to build up diversity, build up the pipeline. We’re building up our own vernacular. We’re building up music to be physical structures.”
Ifasen Kwame sets his model, a bright red assemblage of still-stuck-together staples, into a portable light box and pulls out his phone. The camp’s photographer helps dust off the white backdrop and gives a few pointers—no flash necessary, angle just so—as Kwame taps his camera’s shutter button.
For an analysis of rap lyrics, the students assign a quarter-inch value to each letter in a word, resulting in bars of varying heights that correspond to word length. Aggregated in Tinkercad—a free digital modeling software from Autodesk, the national sponsor of the camps—the bars resemble microscale skylines. These digital models are then either 3D-printed or recreated using stacks of staples. Each construction, about the size of a cube of sticky notes, gets a coating of metallic or bold red spray paint.
“The idea is that we’re freezing music,” Ford says. “It’s based on this quote that I was introduced to in college [from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]: ‘Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.’ If architecture is frozen music, what the hell have we been freezing?”
Ford’s methodology diverges sharply from traditional architectural education. Early in the profession’s history, architects might take a “grand tour” through Europe to view firsthand the works of earlier masters, making it a profession catered to the wealthy and Eurocentric.
Even without reliance on self-funded itineraries abroad, present-day architecture school is a minimum five-year proposition, with the possibility of needing further degrees. The pathway to professional licensure involves another five to seven years, by conservative estimates from the NCARB. As a profession that doesn’t compensate well enough to pay off student debt, architecture may not be the top aspiration for people of limited financial means, if it’s on their radar at all. The way Ford sees it, his camps are a way of asking, “How can we get young people to start making their own architectural style, their own approach, their own vernacular?”
Ford takes the spray-painted microcosms—referred to internally as “smalls”—a step further, directing students to enlarge a portion—the “biggie”—and populate it with little trees and scale figures in an exercise he calls “Biggie Smalls,” which leverages a reference to hip-hop artist Notorious B.I.G. to introduce kids to the idea of architectural scale.
Through these modeling exercises, kids learn to see their city in terms of what it might sound like—and to hear music in terms of how it might be visually represented. As an added bonus, the camp provides portable photography studios to generate what might be the beginnings of a budding architecture student’s first portfolio. But the real fun begins when the students start writing their own lyrics.
Due to a midweek snowstorm, the D.C. students face a compressed timeline to polish their final lyrics. Listening to the track that Ford’s team produced prior to the event, they rehearse their words, with some gentle rhythmic coaching. The best four raps, selected by the volunteers who helped produce them, will appear in aggregate on the final track out of the D.C. session, with the help of Richmond, Virginia, rapper Destiny Da Chef. Just before lunchtime, everyone has drawn numbers to determine the order of their raps, and Benjamin is second.
Benjamin raps about her neighborhood, Eastland Gardens, a quiet residential enclave just inland from the Anacostia River, a place “where houses were built by Lewis K. and Clyde Martin / But the world can’t appreciate their worth / They seem infinitesimal, smaller than neutrons.”
And she has a point: Between 1929 and 1955, roughly two-thirds of Eastland Garden’s 166 buildings were designed by 16 African American architects. Among these were Lewis K. Downing and Clyde Martin Drayton, both graduates of Howard University. But in a place like the District, where monuments and museums occupy most of the architectural consciousness of visitors and residents alike, it’s all too easy to lose sight of marginalized builders from nearly a century ago. And today, families that settled in places like Eastland Gardens decades ago find themselves pushed out by gentrification.
“It’s starting to happen in my community,” Benjamin reflects after the rap battle. “I just wanted to put what we’re going through into the lyrics that I have. It makes me feel like I’m getting something off my chest that I don’t really talk to people about.” Instead, she raps.
