On paper it’s a revolutionary approach to urban design.

But using the poetic rhythm of hip-hop music to inform the designs of buildings and spaces in America’s largest cities actually can make a whole lot of sense.

The lyrics of groundbreaking hip-hop artists like Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee or Tupac Shakur, just to name a few, often derive from the experiences of people of color living in America’s poorest urban communities. In particular, the public housing tower blocks that arose in the 1960s and ’70s were instrumental in helping form one of the most popular forms of current American music.

Now, nationally renowned architect Michael Ford is forging ahead with a mission to use that music to create new and revitalized urban designs. Ford, a native of Detroit, runs his own design and consulting firm, BrandNu Design, in Madison, Wisconsin. And in a larger sense, he’s trying to find a creative new way to revamp and reuse urban spaces in a way that reflects residents’ experiences and needs.

“That’s one of my challenges now is how do you take this and use not only the forms that can be generated from the music, but how can we as urban planners, architects, designers, how do we respond to some of the stories that we hear?” Ford said. “As architects, we hear those stories about the communities that we’re building and it’s creating the backdrop. So, how can we create better environments? That’s the challenge that I’m looking at now.”

On Thursday night, Ford presented his lecture at the Ziba Auditorium in Northwest Portland. He highlighted how modernist architects and planners helped create the urban environments that gave rise to a new form of music and expression. In short, as Ford said in the title of his TEDx Talk, hip-hop is a post-occupancy evaluation of modern architecture.

“It’s all about listening to people, understanding their situation and not just trying to design for a magazine cover,” he told the packed house.

Ford combines sociology, popular culture and urban design in his lectures, which explain how architecture has played such a large part in creating contemporary hip-hop culture.

“The idea of combining architecture and black music is not a new concept,” he said.

For example, the late Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, created early 20th century designs that included a grandiose proposal to redevelop Paris’ center by building massive series of tower blocks. He was turned down, but the concept eventually found roots in the U.S. as public housing high-rises. Le Corbusier also was a lover of jazz music, which inspired his work.

Ultimately, what occurred in American housing projects was exactly what had been predicted when Parisian officials rejected Le Corbusier – and it was expressed in hip-hop music originating in The Bronx and radiating outward.

“The ghetto is not a result of actions of African-Americans,” Ford said. “It’s actually the result of a lot of us who are in this room.”

Ford also is intent on promoting architecture and urban planning among underrepresented youth, especially those of color. To do that, he created a one-week Hip Hop Architecture Camp for students middle-school age and younger.

“Less than two percent of architects in the United States are African-American and less than 0.2 percent are African-American women – that’s the entire country,” he said. “So, with the camp, one of the challenges that has been identified by the American Institute of Architects is early exposure or lack thereof. I mean, you can’t be what you don’t know about.”

Ford held his camp last week at Benson Polytechnic High School. There, he taught approximately a dozen local students the basics of hip-hop architecture and how to apply it to a model city made of Legos.

Students were broken up into groups and each was given a verse from “I Go To Work,” a 1999 single from Kool Moe Dee. Taking that verse, they analyzed the rhymes in the lyrics to graph out a two-dimensional chart. Then, the graph was used to create a three-dimensional model of a planned city using Legos as well as Tinkercad – a streamlined version of Autocad, Autodesk’s industry-standard design software.

“For each line in a song, each word, you add another Lego block,” Mount Tabor Middle School sixth grader Isaiah Paz explained. “Each word that is highlighted or rhymes with another word, that’s where you stack a block for each letter that there is. So, for the first line there are six words, and so I’d put six blocks down like that.”

Ford had little trouble keeping Paz and the others interested.

“The kids have been engaged,” Ford said Wednesday morning. “Yesterday, for example, we tried to take a break, and people did not want to take a break; they wanted to keep going on their projects. So that’s a good sign.”

Paz concentrated on his work with quiet intensity, placing row after row of blocks in patterns based on Kool Moe Dee’s lyrics. The outlines of a cityscape were easily visible in the Legos, with rows of high-rise towers, parks and other public spaces clearly evident.

This was repeated across the classroom, as Hacker associates Joe Swank and Jackie Santa Lucia also worked with students.

Swank said he and others at his firm were introduced to Ford’s work two years ago, and it inspired them to eventually create the “Your Streets, Your Voice” program for underrepresented youth in Portland. Working with The CENTER, the program gives teens an intensive two-month look at architecture and design and opens up career possibilities they probably never knew existed.

“The more we dug into this, the more we realized it wasn’t a firm problem; it was an industry problem,” Swank said at the lecture Thursday. “We realize this is a long game, and we have to engage students earlier and catch them when they’re still in school.”

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has developed a fast-growing reputation nationally for his groundbreaking work tying together the role of architecture in creating the impoverished urban environments that inspired the creation of hip-hop music and culture. Ford presented his lecture Thursday at an and presentation at the Ziba auditorium in Northwest Portland and also hosted his popular Hip Hop Architecture Camp for middle school students all week at Benson Polytechnic High School. This photo gallery shows a few scenes from both the camp and lecture.

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