[THE MAIN EVENT]
“The Hip-Hop Architect” speaks on designing The Bronx’s long-gestating Hip-Hop Museum
UpRising: The Hip-Hop Museum has been in the works since 2016. How do you even start an undertaking this ambitious?
Michael Ford: It started as a vision. A dream. Kurtis Blow and others thinking about what they leave behind beyond the music. Throughout the last eight years, it's been exploring different locations in the Bronx, doing community engagement, bringing artists together to talk about what the museum can be. There's this misconception that the museum is only about New York's contribution to hip-hop. No, we just wanted it to be in the birthplace of the culture. It’s about telling the story of hip-hop’s global impact. We explored three or four different sites before landing where we are: a development called The Bronx Point. About 520 affordable housing units are on top of the museum. I call it poetic justice [since] a lot of the artists who helped start the museum grew up in affordable housing.
What was your vision going into this project? Did you have a philosophy or visual elements you wanted to be sure to include?
After meeting Kurtis Blow and Rocky Bucano, the executive director of the museum, I said, “I don't want to be the person to sketch and draw and say, ‘This is the vision.’” Our communities sometimes are left out on what happens in our neighborhoods. So I approach every project the same way: Let's talk with the people who will ultimately use this space or that the space is about, and let's make something together. Then, I'll build from there. I brought in rappers like Roxanne Shanté. Kurtis Blow invited MCs [and] break dancers. I invited some of the top young Black architects from all across the country. High school students. College students. We locked ourselves in a room for two days and sketched and drew together. It really was working with the culture.We found some great storytellers—we got the people that built the exhibits for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., Ralph Appelbaum Associates. We brought on one of the largest architecture firms in the country—Gensler—to assist in bringing the project to life.
What should we expect from the look and feel of the museum?
The design is centered on the premise of the rose that grew from concrete, a poem from a Tupac [Shakur] song. When you first come in, it's about the foundation. We wanted to show the first floor of the museum as dirty, gritty. New York is a concrete jungle. You're learning about the griots and the inspirations for hip-hop. The second floor is more modern, more colorful. The materials start to change. You're in the rose. Hip-hop has bloomed. Now it’s this international phenomenon. That's what you experience on the second floor, architecturally. And you're now getting into hip-hop as a tool for social justice, starting to see how hip-hop became less of a party and more of an influence on many things.
Very smart.
Later on, we needed a cornerstone. The exterior is finished, but we needed lyrics to put on a cornerstone. What's the theme that's gonna be here forever? We picked lyrics from Biggie: “Never thought that hip-hop would take it this far.” Who would’ve ever thought hip-hop would become a museum? People thought it was a fad. Fifty years later, we got a permanent museum—50,000 square feet of hip-hop. It's massive. So you got a concept based on ’Pac and the cornerstone is Big. It's like hip-hop coming together. This happened organically.
Any surprises you can share?
It's a museum that doesn't focus on lyrics, which is one of the first things people think about when they think about hip-hop. The museum focuses on all elements of the culture. I think that'll be a surprise for people to see that it's not full of rappers. It's all about telling our story. Hip-hop has seeped into everywhere. We've focused on telling the story as broadly as possible.
—John Kennedy
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The Hip-Hop Museum is slated to open in 2027. Along with his firm, BrandNu Design Studio, Ford is also working on a museum in Memphis dedicated to the city’s hip-hop culture, a museum celebrating Black inventors, and a skate park dedicated to Tyre Nichols.
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