The Hip Hop Architecture Camp™ was featured in Good Education!
"From Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five rapping in their 1982 classic “New York New York” about “Staring at a skyscraper reaching into heaven / When over in the ghetto I’m livin’ in hell,” to Jay Z rhyming on 2017’s “Marcy Me” that “I’m from Marcy Houses, where the boys die by the thousand,” hip-hop has always had an intimate relationship with the architecture of cities. But what if the low-income youth of color who live in the ghettos and housing projects of Gotham — or Los Angeles or Detroit — had the technical know-how to redesign their hometowns and create buildings that serve their communities?
That’s the goal of Michael Ford, a Detroit-born architectural designer and founder of the Hip Hop Architecture Camp, “a one-week intensive experience, designed to introduce under represented youth to architecture, urban planning, creative place making and economic development through the lens of hip-hop culture.”
This summer, the free camp, which is sponsored by software company Autodesk, is giving roughly 250 10- to 17-year-old students in six cities (Atlanta, Austin, the Bronx, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles) technically sound and culturally relevant lessons on architecture and urban planning."