sekou cooke STUDIO

Sekou Cooke contributed We Outchea: Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public Space, a design proposal for an architectural intervention in Syracuse, New York, to the 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

We Outchea, commissioned by the museum, comprises a plan and proposal for an architectural intervention in the neighborhood that was once Syracuse’s 15th ward, the project extracts and reveals several layers of the built and visual histories of the site. Sampling the outlines of demolished structures to create a new public realm for entrepreneurship, innovation, and adaptation, the elements of the design are configured as an affront to the banal proposals for mix-income housing.

The project responds to and sheds light on the city’s history of displacing its Black residents through projects of Urban Renewal including the construction of Interstate-81, low-income housing developments, and multiple instances of slum clearance. Revisiting this history takes on renewed significance and offers a compelling critique that responds to contemporary and ongoing examples of displacement.

This landmark exhibition brought together new work by ten leading Black American architects, leading to the formation of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) by the exhibition’s participants––an entity that provides funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora. Cooke is a founding board member of the BRC.

The design assistants for We Outchea were Kyle Simmons, Pin Sangkaeo, Benson Joseph. Photo documentation by Roberto Rivera.