The National Hip Hop Museum is a proposal for an interactive museum and waterfront park located in the South Bronx, celebrating the global impact and achievements of hip hop culture. The proposal is conceptually based on what we consider to be the 4 pillars of hip hop culture. The 4 pillars being as follows:

1. Music in the form Rap or MC and its relationship to sound, oral expression, acoustics, the human voice and the spoken word.

2. Urban Art in the form of Graffiti and its relationship to sight, visual expression, color, graphics and large urban scale art.

3. Urban Dance or Break Dance as physical expression indicative of the role that physicality plays in the relationship between the body, motion and balance.

4. DJ interpreted as the individual capacity to utilize electronic mass communication medium and technology in new and creative ways for cultural expression.

Description by Rodney Leon

The 4 pillars establish themselves spatially as platforms. From these platforms each programmatic pillar contains a space or series of spaces that address the zone in relation to the past, present, and future contexts. These include spaces of exhibitions, performances, and workshops. Folded planes wrap and envelop the spaces with opaque and transparent faces creating a fragmented dynamic within the continuous interior spaces. This logic is extended to the design of the waterfront park, where programmatically the runner, biker, and skater, establish the scale at which the landscape is manipulated. Landscape manipulations augment the activity of such users within the public space of the museum.

Disclaimer: All images and models are the property of RLA Rodney Leon Architects.