The book hip-hop architecture deserves-and the one our era of reckoning demands.

Metropolis

This compelling book simultaneously challenges an inherent elitism (and whiteness) in contemporary architectural theory and practice, and embraces and expands the scholarly vocabulary of the canon.

Library Journal

Hip-Hop Architecture is a call for building design to be instated as the fifth pillar of this cultural movement, joining dance, drama, fine arts and music… As idiosyncratic, challenging and genre-redefining as Hip-hop's other cultural manifestations, Cooke's book argues for a new approach to urban design that better expresses the Black and African American experience.

Wallpaper*

Cooke's book reminds us how what has been built to date is the result of the application of political, social and cultural ideas and principles that have intentionally excluded certain sections of the population. Architecture is the manifesto of this exclusion and, over time, becomes testimony of the errors of a society that should no longer belong to us. So the author starts from hip-hop to get to the maximum systems, because hip-hop is a culture that binds people, unites them in community, through music, sounds, dances. Its pages describe and reflect the values of a culture linked by sound and words.

Elle Décor Italia

Well-researched, engaging and fresh ... [Cooke] strips the paternalizing aspects off, which often pervade the treatises emanating from the ivory towers of academia.

Scene Point Blank

Hip-Hop Architecture is a meditation on architecture's intersection with one of the most influential contemporary cultural movements-hip-hop. Cooke's deft textual and visual riffs merge hip-hop's sonic and performative modalities-remix, breakdance, graffiti-with traditions and practices that inform black spatiality and design.

Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University, USA