Rakim drawing by Askem
Rakim, during an interview with CityLab, compared my passion for hip hop architecture and using hip hop lyrics as modernism's post occupancy evaluation, to the lyrical dexterity of the hip hop MC! Check out the full article here: The Universal Hip Hop Museum and Design Justice
Read MoreArchitect Frank Gehry was in Oviedo to collect the Prince of Asturias prize. Photograph: J l Cereijido/EPA
In this world we are living in, 98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are damn buildings and that’s it. - Frank Ghery
Read More"...you know, this one [Le]Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration. I lived in Paris in this loft space and recorded in my living room, and it just had the worst acoustics possible, but also the songs had to be super simple, because if you turned up some complicated sound and a track with too much bass, it’s not going to work in that space. This is earlier this year. I would go to museums and just like, the Louvre would have a furniture exhibit, and I visited it like, five times, even privately. And I would go see actual Corbusier homes in real life and just talk about, you know, why did they design it? They did like, the biggest glass panes that had ever been done. Like I say, I’m a minimalist in a rapper’s body. It’s cool to bring all those vibes and then eventually come back to Rick [Rubin], because I would always think about Def Jam." - Kanye West
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Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Getty
Quest Love's thought proving series examining How Hip Hop Has Failed Black America written for Vulture, make us hip hoppas think critically about the gravitas nature of our culture. Although Quest questions the legitimacy of hip hop architecture, I am happy to know that he is aware of the architectural investigation. I would love to discuss with him, how the hip hop generation is incorporating our culture into the architectural profession.
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Photo: George Stroud/Getty Images
Pablo Picasso's famous quote is the epitome of his "innovative" career. During my "Hip Hop Inspired Architecture" Exhibit at the 2014 American Institute of Architects National Convention in Chicago, I revealed some of Picasso's greatest acts of thievery. The most notorious of them all is his personally unacknowledged "Black Period", a time in which Picasso was deeply entrenched in African Art, resulting in his supposed creation of Cubism as we know it today.