School of Architecture Names New Master of Urban Design Director

The School of Architecture has announced that architect, researcher, educator, and curator Sekou Cooke will become the new director of the Master of Urban Design (MUD) program. Cooke will join the architecture faculty in August.

Jamaican born, Cooke comes to UNC Charlotte from Syracuse, New York, where he is currently an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. Through his professional practice, sekou cooke STUDIO, he brings thoughtful processes and rigorous experimentation to a vast array of project types – from public, non-profit, and residential works in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, to mixed-use projects and tenant improvements in California, to speculative developments locally and internationally.

Cooke’s current research centers on the emergent field of Hip-Hop Architecture, a theoretical movement reflecting the core tenets of hip-hop culture with the power to create meaningful impact on the built environment and give voice to the marginalized and underrepresented within design practice. This work has been widely disseminated through his writings, lectures, and symposia and is the subject of his monograph, Hip-Hop Architecture. Cooke’s work is also featured in the landmark exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through May 31. (Read an article in the New York Times about the exhibition and the Black Reconstruction Collective.)

“Sekou Cooke is a rising star in the architecture world and has a national reputation based on his innovative, activist-based approaches to elevating Black voices in the field,” said School of Architecture Director Blaine Brownell. “With his hire as the new director of the Master of Urban Design program, we anticipate that his scholarship on Hip-Hop Architecture and urbanism, pioneering installations like MoMA’s recent Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, accomplished teaching at one of the nation’s top architecture programs, and prodigious leadership potential will contribute immeasurably to our School, College, University, and the city of Charlotte.”

Cooke holds a B.Arch from Cornell University and an M.Arch from Harvard University and is licensed to practice architecture in New York State.