The hip-hop architect

Michael Ford wants to revolutionize his field

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Class is out for the summer, but Michael Ford is still in teaching — and recruiting — mode.

The Madison College professor of architecture is meeting a recent East High graduate at the DreamBank downtown to chat about careers. The student had been leaning toward engineering, but Ford is pushing him to consider a different kind of design.

Ford shows him examples of architecture from around the world using Google Cardboard virtual reality goggles. He also shares a copy of Pharrell Williams’ Places and Spaces I’ve Been, and tells him to go home and pick out things in the book that interest him.

And he sets him straight on one thing.

“There won’t be students who look like you, and there are very few professors who look like you,” he told the young man. “But that’s exactly why we need you.”

Like Ford, the prospective student is black.

When it comes to the numbers, Ford isn’t exaggerating. Only 4% of the more than 107,000 architects in the United States are African American, according a 2015 report from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. Ford calls the lack of other African Americans in the field the “biggest hurdle.”

“Dealing with that and being able to cope with it is hard,” he says. “So, you have to find a way to make architecture relatable to you, to make it your own.”

“I did that by bringing hip-hop into my work,” continues Ford, who’s dressed in a simple Ralph Lauren T-shirt and black Nike Air Max sneakers. “They call me the hip-hop architect.”

Ford, a 33-year-old Detroit native, is gaining a national reputation for helping develop an architectural style and philosophy — “hip-hop architecture” — that he believes will open up the field to new voices and collaborative approaches, creating more inclusive planning processes. He was recently tapped to lead the design process for a high-profile project, a new hip-hop museum in the Bronx, N.Y., and is developing a local program through the National Organization of Minority Architects to attract more young people to the profession.

Fusing hip-hop with architecture is not just about creating a new design style — one inspired by the 3D structure of graffiti or breakdancers’ poses — it’s about fostering fresh, out-of-the-box thinking. “There were tools and instruments that were not available to the pioneering hip-hop artists,” explains Ford. “They didn’t have the traditional instruments — the trumpets or keyboards — so they looked to records and their parents’ turntables, and they were able to create a new style of music.”

Ford believes those drawn to architecture through hip-hop will be able to tap into that same ingenuity. “People in this generation, people like me, are looking to make a name for themselves in architecture, but we don’t have the reach or the resources — so, how can we go about it in a totally different way?”

His end goal isn’t just about jobs — it’s about empowering people of color.

“The people that are developing our communities don’t represent the diversity within the communities,” says Ford. “No one who looks like them is sitting at the table to represent their ideas or make sure their interests are being upheld during the discussions.”

Ford has been studying the intersection of urban culture and design since his undergraduate years at the University of Detroit Mercy.

In the past few years, Ford has published articles and lectured — with the aid of a DJ spinning rap — at conferences and colleges, including the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Syracuse University, UW-Milwaukee and University of Illinois at Urbana.

In 2014, he curated an exhibit at the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects called “Cultural Innovation: Hip-Hop Inspired Arts and Architecture.” He’s also created an extensive website for his company, BrandNu Design, which includes conceptual renderings for hip-hop-infused spaces and a blog.

Ford emphasizes that hip-hop architecture is an emerging style. But he says it relies on two hip-hop pillars: breakdancing and street art, aka graffiti.

“Graffiti provides a precedent for 3D shapes in geometry that are unprecedented in architecture,” he says, adding that elements like drop shadows and bevels “create presence.”

And Ford says the poses of breakdancers also provide valuable insight. “We need to investigate their poses because there must be some kind of stability to them. And, if we can understand it, can we scale it up to create new architecture — or even furniture?”

Ford is not alone in his quest to reimagine architecture. Sekou Cooke, an architect and professor at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture in New York, and others are also actively pursuing the fusion of hip-hop and architecture. But the merger is very much in its infancy.

“It’s an uphill climb. You have to have clients who will embrace your vision, that will allow you to practice and produce your work over and over again,” says Craig Wilkins, an author and professor of architecture and urban planning of the University of Michigan. “I believe that those who really want to practice hip-hop architecture are going to be looking for projects in communities that will allow them to practice this kind of work,” explains Wilkins. “[That] means they’re going to be working in areas that really need some architectural and development interventions and that also allow people of color to not only be a client, but also be an owner and a designer.”

Ford, says Wilkins, “needs the right client and the right project to show the world what he can do.”

As Ford sees it, architecture — or, more accurately, bad architecture — created hip-hop.

“Hip-hop and architecture are seemingly unrelated, but when understood, it’s impossible to break the two from each other,” he says. “[Architects] provide the spaces that dictate interactions between people, and those interactions between people are the basis of culture.”

Bronx housing projects incubated early hip-hop artists in the 1970s, says Ford. “When you look at the design of public housing, it’s modular, very nondescript. That became the definition of public housing across the urban landscape,” he explains. “It’s tall, brick towers that lack detail — those towers became the cultural incubators.”

In his graduate school thesis, “Cultural Innovation: A Hip-Hop Inspired Architecture,” Ford dug deeper. He found that the idea for low-income housing projects started with Swiss architect Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modern architecture who designed a set of high-rise housing units for Paris. While the French dismissed Le Corbusier’s monotonous designs, a New York city planner named Robert Moses adopted them and used the design concepts to construct many of New York City’s housing projects.

“I call Moses’ implementation of Corbusier’s plan the worst remix ever,” says Ford. “The policies within public housing, along with the architecture, had a huge role in birthing hip-hop culture. Hip-hop was born from these bad environments.”

Of course, the architects who designed public housing felt differently about them. “I’ve gone back to look at videos, books and things created by architectural historians who described [the low-income housing] as the perfect solution for urban areas, and I use hip-hop as this counterargument to say, ‘No, actually you created some of the worst architecture and environments imaginable.’”

Ford looks to rap songs for evidence to support his theory. Take Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” for example, which speaks to the hopeless atmosphere of housing projects: “You’ll grow in the ghetto, livin’ second-rate/And your eyes will sing a song called deep hate/The places you play and where you stay looks like one great big alleyway.”

“When the designers created their low-income housing projects, like where Jay Z grew up [called the Marcy Houses], they envisioned fields of grass,” says Ford. “But the towers they built blocked out the sun and no grass could grow, so they just became dirt fields, and as [Jay Z] says, shards of glass replaced those blades of grass.”

Ford grew up in Highland Park, a poor neighborhood in Detroit. He lived with his parents and four sisters in a flat above a supper club, and his introduction to hip-hop came early. “On Friday nights, the club hosted a ‘kid disco,’ and on Saturday nights, it was the 21-and-up crowd,” he recalls. “There was a common area from our apartment that led down some stairs to the club, and next to that dark stairway was the DJ booth.”

He and his cousins would sneak down to watch the action. “We found the sweet spot on the stairs where the DJ couldn’t see us but we could watch everyone dancing.”

Songs forever stuck in his memory from those days in the mid-’80s include “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, “It Takes Two” by Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock and, of course, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. “I could hear these songs from my bedroom and hear the bass thumping. It was like the sound was drawing me to come down and see what was happening.”

He had always wanted to become an automotive designer. But after taking a few architecture classes at Cass Technical, a large public high school in Detroit, he was hooked.

He pursued that interest to college, where he began to make the connection between the music and culture he’d grown up in and his chosen profession. “Architecture is like a tree with branches that are different styles.”

But none of those branches seemed relevant to him. “In architecture school, you study a lot of Western European architects and learn they’re the greatest architects, the greatest thinkers and the greatest city planners,” says Ford. “So, you always feel as though your community had very little contribution — and you’re given very little hope that you’re going to have any contribution because all the great thinkers don’t look like you.”

In grad school, Ford had his epiphany.

“Hip-hop was my vessel to allow me to revisit the history of architecture and tell it from the eyes of hip-hop culture. And it also gave me the opportunity to create a new architectural style that’s not dominated by someone outside of me.”

“Good architecture,” says Ford, “goes beyond bricks and mortar. Good architecture protects and liberates its inhabitants.” After grad school, Ford landed a job in Detroit with Hamilton Anderson Associates, one of the country’s largest black-owned architecture firms, where he worked on projects that embodied his ideas of “good architecture.” He was on the team that designed Wayne County Community College’s Larry K. Lewis Education Center in Detroit and the Louis Armstrong Park and Congo Square in New Orleans. The college project is significant for its groundbreaking environmental design; it was the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum building in the state of Michigan. And creating a jazz park in New Orleans was important for historic reasons. At one point, Congo Square was the only place where slaves were allowed to congregate to make music on Sundays.

Ford also found support for his ideas of melding hip-hop and architecture. Co-owner Rainy Hamilton Jr. pushed him to give his first lecture on the topic at a conference of the National Organization of Minority Architects in 2007. Ford also taught architecture courses for his alma mater.

He married in 2009, and he and his wife, Gail, moved to Madison in 2010 so Ford could take a job with Flad Architects, where he helped design hospitals and research laboratories.

In 2014, Ford accepted a full-time professorship at Madison College, where he had been teaching part time.

He favors a collaborative approach in the classroom. “Other professors kind of want you to sit and watch, but he has us all do it together as a class so when someone gets stuck, we all learn from it and figure out how to fix it,” says Allison Eicher, a student in Ford’s computer design class.

As an added bonus for hip-hop fans, Ford’s classes have a soundtrack. “He’s always playing it in the background — new, old and everything in-between,” says Eicher. “You can tell he plays it not just because he wants us to know about it, but that he really loves it.”

Ford says his students inspire his own creativity, and he enjoys helping young people explore the field: “Their imagination is wide open and not as inhibited by constraints such as budgets or programmatic ideas that the clients may come in with.” Teaching, he adds, allows time “to research and explore things that the profession might not be ready for.”

Thus far Ford’s hope to educate a new generation of black architects is still a dream. “In the two years since I’ve been there, there have been six African American [architecture] students out of about 200 students [I’ve taught],” says Ford. “One has graduated. Only one.”

That’s part of the reason why Ford is backing the proposed expansion of the college’s south campus. He believes it would be a step in the right direction for all students of color, regardless of their field of study.

“There’s an obvious deficit when it comes to minorities [at Madison College] — not just with students but also with instructors,” says Ford.

And when it comes to his chosen field, step one is to expose children of color to the promise of architecture. “One of the key things that can improve diversity is letting children know this is a field they can get involved with and a field that needs you and wants you,” he says.

But Ford isn’t waiting for others to reach out to young students. He and another black architect, Rafeeq Asad of Flad Associates, are creating a local chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects; they hope to implement a program called Project Pipeline by the end of summer. Historically, the NOMA program has been offered to juniors and seniors in high school, but Ford and Asad’s version may include students as young as 12 years old.

Recently recruited by a Madison College colleague to be the architect for the Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx, Ford has a prime opportunity to put his theories into action.

Hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow, one of the museum’s founding members, says Ford is the perfect fit for the project.

“We get the best of both worlds with Michael Ford. He grew up in the culture, he knows hip-hop, he lives hip-hop, he feels it with his heart, and he is one of the best in his business,” says Blow, who’s best known for creating the rap classic “The Breaks.”

Slated to open in a couple years, the museum is currently securing funds for remodeling an old courthouse. Ford recently facilitated planning meetings in New York City that included students from Madison College’s architecture program and the UW’s First Wave initiative. Instead of using the traditional architectural term “charrette,” the group dubbed the brainstorm sessions “design cyphers” —  a nod to rap cyphers, where emcees spit their latest lyrics in an effort to improve their delivery and outdo each other.

The students created 3D renderings for the museum that include a large outdoor plaza called “The Corner” — a reference to the city street corners where many rappers got their start. The idea is to create a flexible space to showcase different art installations, live performances and serve as a beacon for the museum.

Inside, designers envision subway cars that will serve as virtual canvases for graffiti, including art created by museum visitors, among many other hip-hop-related exhibits. 

Having the museum’s end-users — hip-hop fans, students and rap artists themselves — involved in the design process will help ensure the project’s success. Useful, functional architecture “is determined by the people who occupy the space,” says Ford.

Ford might also end up playing a big role in another arm of the museum. He was recently named a finalist for a $200,000 “Place By Design” grant from SXSW Eco (an offshoot of the annual South By Southwest multimedia conference held in Austin, Texas) to create “The UHHM Mobile Museum,” a traveling installation that will collect stories and artifacts for the Bronx museum.

For Ford, the hip-hop museum is just the beginning.

All it would take for hip-hop architecture to truly take off, he says, would be one large project, a building created from the ground up that incorporates the aesthetics and innovative nature of hip-hop. Maybe it will take a big name getting involved. Pharrell and Kanye West have both expressed an interest in the field, and, interestingly, Ice Cube once studied architectural drafting.

“Once a project is done in tandem with a hip-hop artist, that architect is going to receive a lot of attention,” Ford says. And that publicity will invigorate and energize a new generation of architects, he predicts: “We’re going to create architecture that hasn’t been seen before. And I don’t mean just visually, I mean programmatically — we’ll be creating architecture that enables and empowers communities.”