Sekou Cooke is an architect and urban designer whose practice centers community and human interaction as the defining aesthetic experience of space. A celebrated scholar and practitioner, Cooke’s approach to architecture across theory and built work is one rooted in history and positioned for engagement, flexibility, and continued innovation in use and form. His grounding design principles are rooted deeply in the civic politics and culture of the Black experience worldwide.
Cooke was born and raised in Jamaica, and founded his practice in the United States, building a unique perspective informed by the commonalities and creative inspirations in particularly Black ways of communing; from the concrete jungles of Kingston to housing projects in the Bronx. Cooke’s study of architecture and urban design has focused on methods of organizing space and drawing inspiration that have influenced global culture through media like hip-hop. Early work in this area became the subject of his monograph Hip-Hop Architecture, published in April 2021, and the 2018 exhibition Cooke curated, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture. Expanded interest in culturally-based practice will be explored in his second monograph from Park Books in 2025, entitled Black Architect, which includes interviews with leading and emerging Black figures in American architecture, documenting their experiences, perspectives, and ambitions for Blackness in the field.
In his own practice, these ideas have come to life across various types of projects, ranging from community centers to private residential buildings to temporary architectural interventions. Notable projects include a forthcoming monument to minority veterans in Syracuse, NY, the planned Syracuse Hip-Hop Headquarters, a masterplan of Selma, Alabama’s historic downtown district, designs for Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety’s Standard Plan ADU Program, and Grids + Griots, an architectural intervention commissioned for the 2021 Chicago
Architecture Biennial.
The studio has received widespread recognition for its design work, including a 2022 Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, and inclusion in the landmark exhibition, Reconstructions, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. Other design awards include an honorable mention in the Faculty Design category of the 2020 ACSA awards for Close to the Edge, receiving a commendation for the Government of Jamaica (GOJ) Houses of Parliament international design competition, placing as a finalist for the Reimagine Place AIA Central New York design competition, and having an exhibited entry for the Elevating Erie national design competition.
Sekou holds a B.Arch from Cornell University, an M.Arch from Harvard University, and is licensed to practice architecture in New York and North Carolina. He is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and a former Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte. He has also been an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University, and the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
