Sekou Cooke. Photo: Julie Hernan.

In this installment of our Studio Snapshot series, we had the chance to chat with architect, educator, and curator Sekou Cooke, who has been enormously prolific in recent years with acclaimed exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Center for Architecture in New York, urban interventions at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, a fellowship at Harvard University, a program director position at UNC Charlotte's School of Architecture, and a book on Hip-Hop Architecture, just to name a few.

The hard work and dedication to the profession were recently recognized, among other accolades, by The Architectural League of New York with a coveted Emerging Voices award.

Can you tell us how sekou cooke STUDIO was founded?

There were many start and stop points for what eventually became sekou cooke STUDIO, beginning with my first independent commission in 2003 for a loft space in Brooklyn Heights, and then in 2004, with a collaboration with my good friend Efrain Perez for a restaurant we did in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called Fanny. That year, Efrain, Olalekan Jeyifous, Anaelechi Owunwanne, and I formed a collective called slap.ink. After moving to San Francisco in 2006 and working for another firm for a couple of years, I once again started an independent practice. I wanted to use the name slap.ink STUDIO to keep my connections with the Brooklyn crew, but they weren’t really down with that. They also gave me the confidence I needed to believe that I could practice under my own name. sekou cooke STUDIO, as it stands today, really began in that San Francisco office in 2008.

I’ve moved cities three times since then and barely survived the 2008–10 recession. But I’ve had an unbroken streak of at least one active professional project since then.

How many people are currently employed at the firm? How is your office structured?

My office is primarily me, running all the projects and the design work. I depend heavily on my full-time executive assistant Mirra Goldfrad and my communications consultant Sara Griffin, along with help from student interns, to produce much of the work. I currently have two former Syracuse grads working remotely with me on their way to starting grad school at Harvard and another current student from UNC Charlotte. I will be welcoming a new full-time designer who just got his B.Arch from Cornell. I have had full-time design staff in the recent past, but they haven’t been able to stick around very long. It takes quite a lot of project revenue to keep a full-time staff going.

Would you like to scale up and grow your team? What do you consider the ideal size for your practice?

I imagine scaling up almost every day. I’m still working on finding the right way to do it. Training is a huge part of the equation that often gets missed by incoming employees. There needs to be a buffer time built in to get new staff up to speed on exactly what the firm philosophy is and the general way we prefer to do things. There is also great agency that individual employees have in a firm this young and this small. Helping them find that balance between doing things as they are expected to be done and finding new ways to do things is a big part of that start-up period. With careful, measured growth, I think we could become a healthy small firm with 15–20 members on our team.

What have been the biggest hurdles in starting and running your own practice?

Beyond the staffing issues I’ve described above and the typical challenges of finding new lucrative work, the biggest hurdles are balancing the amount of administrative tasks that are part of running any business and being a creative. You really have to schedule in thinking time and design time as if they were any other kind of meeting time. Carving out large sections of quality time to think and design is a luxury, but it is immensely pleasurable once you find it.

Carving out large sections of quality time to think and design is a luxury, but it is immensely pleasurable once you find it.

What challenges have you faced during the past pandemic years? Are you sensing a return to 'business as usual’?

I’ve never had “business as usual,” so that’s not ever going to be something I feel I’m headed toward. The biggest challenge is working with people remotely. I much rather have the kinds of unexpected conversations and idea exchanges that happen when people work in the same space. I named my office “STUDIO” rather than “Architects” or “Associates” for a reason. I want this office to truly function like a studio emulating the same design studio culture we all grew up in.

I named my office “STUDIO” rather than “Architects” or “Associates” for a reason. I want this office to truly function like a studio emulating the same design studio culture we all grew up in.

Describe your work. How do you define your own unique style and approach?

“Question everything” is my dominant design mantra. If my work isn’t challenging some aspect of current institutions and structures we’ve inherited (including adopting a singular design “style”), then I’m not doing it right. I’m deeply invested in not just finding creative solutions for clients but fundamentally transforming the way we practice.

Besides being a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, you are also the Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte and the 2021–22 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. How do your academic work and professional practice inform each other?

I see all of the above as elements of a singular platform based in the philosophies exemplified within the book Hip-Hop Architecture. My research, academic appointments, writings, lectures, and professional practice are all individual outcroppings of a singular ideology about architecture that I’m continually refining. 

“Question everything” is my dominant design mantra. If my work isn’t challenging some aspect of current institutions and structures we’ve inherited (including adopting a singular design “style”), then I’m not doing it right.

My work and my life are both evolving alongside the evolution of this platform I’m building. This may all sound lofty or even a bit wacky, but you can’t produce exceptional results using conventional thinking.

Listen to Archinect's 2018 conversation with Cooke about the "Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture" exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York City.

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress.

My favorite projects are always the ones I’m working on. I truly regard each new project as better than the one before. The ones that I’m working on now are so nascent, they're not even worth mentioning besides the fact that I’m super excited to see them come to life.

If you could describe your work/practice in three words, what would they be?

Build dope shit.