Black Architect Book Talk with Sekou Cooke & Mabel Wilson

Join Sekou Cooke and Mabel Wilson on Thursday, August 6 at Head Hi to celebrate this important new book, get a copy, and meet the author and his work!

Black Architect is a provocative and deeply personal investigation into the intersection of race, identity, and the built environment. Written by architect and educator Sekou Cooke, author of Hip-Hop Architecture, this book blends memoir, cultural critique, and a series of candid conversations with leading Black practitioners to explore what it truly means to be a Black architect in America.

Cooke traces his journey from a childhood in Jamaica and an early fascination with architecture to Ivy League institutions and into a professional field shaped by Eurocentric ideals, confronting readers with an uncomfortable reality: architecture in the United States continues to be constructed—both literally and conceptually—through a predominantly white lens. But what happens when Blackness enters that space, not just as identity but as a mode of thinking, designing, and living?

This program is organized by Head Hi, Park Books and Sekou Cooke.

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More about the book:

Through a compelling mix of personal narrative and interviews with some of today’s most influential Black designers and thinkers, Black Architect charts the historical marginalization of Black voices in architecture, the structural and cultural obstacles they face, and the alternative visions they bring to the discipline. It offers both a critical reckoning with architecture’s exclusionary past and a hopeful blueprint for a more inclusive future. Most importantly, it highlights why the subject matters to everyone, including those who are neither Black nor architects.

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Sekou Cooke is an architect, urban designer, researcher, and curator, born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a former Assistant Professor at Syracuse University and a former Associate Professor and Urban Design Graduate Program Director at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Cooke’s research into the Hip-Hop Architecture movement has been explored through his writings, exhibitions, lectures, and symposia. It is the subject of his monograph Hip-Hop Architecture, published in April 2021, and the 2018 exhibition Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture. His architecture practice, sekou cooke STUDIO, has received widespread recognition for its design work including a 2022 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York.

Mabel O. Wilson is a professor of Architecture and chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been at the Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture. For MoMA, she was co-curator of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

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Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art, architecture and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events. 

Park Books is a publishing house for architecture and related fields, and an international platform for architectural book projects. It was established in 2012 as an affiliate of the renowned art, photography, and architectural publishers Scheidegger & Spiess in Zürich and likewise attaches great importance to the design and material quality of its publications. The publishing house is independently owned and run by dedicated employees who bring their various strengths and experience to bear on their work.