“We don’t talk about money in architecture school”

Happy Friday! Is the Kennedy Center still standing? I hope our friends in D.C., including Kriston Capps and Neil Flanagan, will investigate and report back. In the meantime, you can find our earlier coverage of the Trump administration’s attempts to take over or dismantle the KenCen—or maybe to take it over in order to dismantle it—here. And now for this week’s dispatch:

In “Black Architect: Conversations from Deep Inside a Misunderstood Profession” (Park Books), Sekou Cooke interviews a who’s-who of prominent Black figures in architecture and architectural education, including Jack Travis, Mabel O. Wilson, Germane Barnes, Lesley Lokko, Zena Howard, Olalekan Jeyifous, and Ray Dalton. (David Adjaye is also featured, with details about accusations that he sexually harrassed or sexually assaulted three employees confined to a single footnote.) The discussions, though they are of course about race, keep circling back to another related theme—to, as Lokko puts it, “the heart of wealth and power.”

A few weeks ago, I met with Cooke on Zoom to talk about the book, architecture’s reaction to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, and his own career trajectory. In addition to running his own practice, Sekou Cooke Studio, he is a former Assistant Professor at Syracuse University and former Associate Professor and Urban Design Graduate Program Director at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His first book, “Hip-Hop Architecture,” was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury. He studied at Cornell and the GSD. What follows has been lightly edited and condensed.