In late 2013, Kanye West visited the Harvard Graduate School of Design and said, “I really do believe that the world can be saved through design,” and “everything needs to actually be ‘architected.’” For many, this collision of hip-hop and architecture was unexpected, and the staid crowd of architectural professionals reacted, let’s say, defensively.

But this was hardly the first encounter between the two worlds, as architect and Syracuse University associate professor Sekou Cooke demonstrated at a lecture at AIA New York last Thursday.