MODA’s new exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture includes work by 34 participants from across the globe. Hip-Hop Architecture is a design movement that embodies the collective creative energies native to young denizens of urban neighbourhoods. Its designers produce spaces, buildings, and environments that translate hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form.

Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture includes work by participants with projects ranging across a variety of media and forms of expression: from experimental visualization formats and installation strategies, to façade studies, building designs, and urban development proposals. In aggregate, these projects reveal a collective vision for alternative forms of expression and practice, and serve to formalize work created over the past 25 years into an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.

Curation and Exhibition Design: Sekou Cooke