Embracing the Five Elements of Hip-Hop

The project revisits a 1994 proposal to develop a Hip-Hop Park on the near south side of Chicago. The site is the former home of the Chicago Coliseum, at the time a debris laden vacant lot where two partially demolished facades remained to mark the Coliseum’s passing. The project – an appropriation of space by the local youth as a place of recreation due to the lack of available open space in their community – demonstrates the application the following primary principles of Hip Hop architecture established in essays and books during and since: the palimpsestic, the adaptive and the performative.

The design original design authorized a place for the typical outdoor performances that occur regularly in this community, providing staging space for hip hop dancing, wall space for graffiti artwork (tagging) and portable vendor booths to serve as a hip hop community flea market. Providing for the specific spatial practices of a particular community, the palimpsestic qualities of the park erases the notion of vandalism and degradation and rewrites – in the same place – a narrative of validation and desire. Providing for not only the tangible interaction in various forms of creating and viewing the performance of everyday life (the economic, political, communal and physical exchanges) but also the tactile interaction with immobile objects (graffiti walls, speaker stands, vending booths) as well, the park acts as one large stage; a stage for the performance of life, concerned primarily with the creation of identity through the performance of music, by both musicians and audiences. Each of these constantly shifting groups are invited to perform in the park at specific locations (central and side stages, grass knolls, dance platforms, bazaar, etc.), but like the adaptive nature of hip hop culture, such spaces are easily and continuously transformed by the users as they continue to write and rewrite their identity in and on this space.

In revisiting the original design for a current proposal for the site, this proposal aims to illustrate how the principles that drove its original design are still applicable today. The area has experienced a good deal of gentrification – the incoming residents are younger, wealthier and whiter. Despite the original intent to provide a park space where impoverished African American residents might engage in specific spatial practices allowing them to create their own identity, this same park provides similar opportunities for the current and incoming residents to collectively create an identity as well, demonstrating the adaptability and palimpsestic nature of the work itself over time, income, race and class. In this manner, the park truly embodies the teleology of the musical genre itself, which began as a specific expression of impoverished African Americans and has grown beyond that limited understanding to become embraced by many and in the process, empowering and altering life opportunities for the better.