SXSWORLD

Michael Ford. Photo by Nicole Burton SXSW.COM | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 6 | SXS W O R L D 2 5  "Le Corbusier was a Swiss architect who had a plan for helping out the working-class citizens of Paris—he wanted to reshape or redesign the center of Paris with these high-rise buildings. He had this grand scheme to liberate the working-class in Paris, and Paris thought he was crazy, because they didn't know what social impact high-density living would have on its residents, so they never do it," Ford explains. "Then Robert Moses, years later, builds the Cross- Bronx Expressway in New York, and he goes to Le Corbusier's plan for Paris as a solution for not displacing residents, which was a huge problem in building the expressway, because they had to play through a black neighborhood. So he samples Le Corbusier's plan. It's the worst sample in history—usually, when a hip-hop artist samples something, they take the best part of the song. It's an original piece, but you want to take that chorus or one note that everybody loves, and you speed it up, slow it down, or stutter it. You want to do something that makes it a new piece, but that resonates with people because it evokes the emotion that the former piece previously did. Robert Moses took the one thing that was heavily critiqued about Le Corbusier's plan, brought it into New York, and he looped it around the entire country. It became the typology of public housing in the United States—the tall, monoto- nous towers—and those towers became the birthplace of hip-hop."  All of this matters both to hip-hop and architecture not just because of the way the birth of one is tied into the ideas behind the other, but because the cities in which hip-hop lives are populated by a diverse collection of people—and the people responsible for shaping those cities are significantly less diverse than the people who live there. As Ford has developed the thesis of hip-hop archi- tecture from grad school project to a new way of thinking about designing the world in which we live, he has pursued a way to redefine what "success" means.  "As an architectural student, most of the names that you hear as precedent studies in those careers are mostly white males, Europeans, and for me, it was always someone outside of myself who defined success," he says.  Now, though, Ford is designing the Universal Hip Hop Museum in Brooklyn, and he counts the same rappers he idolized throughout his life among his fans. "Success" can come in many forms, and Ford's vision for an architecture that reflects hip-hop has brought him more than one kind.  "For Rakim just to say your name, and to recognize that the same poetics that he brought, and the lyrical dexterity that he pres- ents," Ford says, "For him to say that someone is doing the same thing in architecture, and that he sees the correlation, to me, that's awe-inspiring."

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