Building cities of rhyme: How hip-hop architecture could change the future of design

There's more to rap rhymes than good music. If fact, if you ask Michael Ford, beats can make buildings.

Ford, a Wisconsin-based architect known as the 'Hip Hop Architect,' has married his love of rap with his passion for design.

Last week, he brought his Hip Hop Architecture Camp to Toronto for the first time, teaching kids who love hip-hop that they can be architects too.

"Currently, in the U.S., less than 3% of all architects are African-American, and less 0.2% are African-American women," Ford said.

"With such low numbers, the question is: who's advocating for these communities when we're building projects or when we're ... developing communities?" 

Young people in those communities are engaged in hip-hop culture, Ford adds, and that's a bridge into the world of design.

"When people first hear the phrase 'hip-hop architecture' it does sound like two things that are seemingly unrelated," Ford said.

"But I often tell people that hip-hop is a post-occupancy evaluation of modern architecture, meaning that all of our lyrics are saturated with critiques of the environments that necessitated the birth of hip-hop."

At the Toronto camp, kids between the ages of 10 and 14 printed the lyrics of their favourite rap songs and highlighted the rhyming words in the lyrics.

Young people can now compare the lyrics of their favourite rappers, not through a sonic experience, but by visually seeing the lyrics themselves from Lego models.- Michael Ford, the Hip Hop Architect 

"After a kid highlights all of the rhyming words within a song they teach them a process of making or building that song with Legos," Ford told Day 6.

Every word in a line of lyrics gets represented by a Lego. And each rhyming word is represented by a stack of Legos. The height of the stack depends on the number of letters in rhyming word.

"The end result is a song now looks like a cityscape or master plan for a city," Ford said.

"Young people can now compare the lyrics of their favourite rappers, not through a sonic experience, but by visually seeing the lyrics themselves from Lego models."

Students in the camp are also asked to consider the societal issues referenced in rap songs, and to think of design solutions to address them.

They're then asked to come up with their own rhymes and challenge each other in a rap battle.

Kyla Blake, 14, won the rap battle at Toronto Hip Hop Architecture.

"I made my rap based on poverty, and about how we see people who are poor as ... a joke because they don't have a home," Blake said.

"I wrote that we aren't so much better than them, it's just that we were we have things that they don't."

Blake, who wants to pursue a career in urban design said he had never before made the connection between hip-hop and design.

"You can't spell architecture without art, and that's what I found out during the camp."

The Hip Hop Architecture Camp will go to Vancouver in September.