Given the hip-hop elite's affiliation with prestige brands – from Cristal to Courvoisier, from Louis Vuitton to Lamborghini – you'd think they'd be similarly discerning when it comes to architecture. But that's not always the case, especially when it comes to the biggest stars of all. This week, details emerged of the Hamptons holiday home being rented by Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Taste-wise, it's not exactly as cutting-edge as their music: a sprawling modern mansion the size of a hotel, in the traditional "shingle style" so beloved of the Hamptons and its moneyed clientele: big, colonial-looking, with a bit of wood and classical detailing.
You can see why it appealed, though. Dubbed The Sandcastle, the 31,000 sq ft property is on sale for US$43.5m (£27.8m), although the couple are reportedly renting it for $400,000 a month. It has all the luxuries you can think of – 60ft pool, sunken tennis court, bowling alley, home cinema with "interactive seats" – plus some that would never occur to you, such as an underwater pool stereo and a combination squash-and-basketball-court (with moving walls). Then there's a "children's performing area" to get their six-month-old daughter Ivy Blue started. "I was raised in the projects, roaches and rats," Jay-Z once sang. "Smokers out back sellin' they mama's sofa." Ivy Blue probably won't be doing the same.
Jay-Z is living the American Dream, even if he was once a fierce critic of it. But then hip-hop has often veered into architectural criticism (music's more lucrative, guys). Rap is constantly responding to its environment, which is invariably high-density urban public housing – in Jay-Z's case, Brooklyn's Marcy Houses. There's rarely anything positive to say and countless hip-hop classics – from Grandmaster Flash's The Message onwards ("Can't take the smell, can't take the noise/ Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice") – have essentially catalogued the failures of urban planning. Without bad architecture, hip-hop might never have happened.
Although Jay-Z named his biggest album after a British design magazine (unless he was thinking of a different Blueprint), it's Kanye West, his partner on the Watch the Throne album, who shows a keener design sensibility. West was a judge for style mag Wallpaper's annual awards in 2009 and regularly posted about architecture and design on his entertaining (and now sadly defunct) blog, enthusing about everything from Herzog and de Meuron in Tribeca ("GONE BE NIIIIICE!!") to concrete modernist houses in Mexico ("So amazing … so amazing!"). This January, West announced he was setting up his own multi-disciplinary design company, DONDA, with 22 departments. "We can collectively effect the world trough design," West tweeted. "We need to pick up where steve jobs left off." We've seen few results so far, though at this year's Cannes film festival West unveiled a seven-screen movie pavilion in a bespoke pyramidal structure designed by Dutch architectural supremos OMA.
There are more. NERD's Pharrell Williams last year designed a limited edition fixed wheel "gangsta track" bike (in lurid yellow) with France's Domeau & Pérès, and is now working on a sustainable youth centre in his hometown, Virginia Beach in Virginia. Topping them all, and favouring the "less is more" route, is Ice Cube, who has progressed from tooled-up criticism of Compton in his NWA days, into a deeper appreciation of the architecture of Los Angeles.
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In his video about the celebrated Eames House, a landmark in Modern architecture, he rails against McMansions in favour of Charles and Ray Eames's utilitarian marvel, drawing parallels between its off-the-shelf components and hip-hop sampling ("they was doing mash-ups befo' mash-ups existed"). "Coming from south central Los Angeles," he says, "you gotta use what you got and make the best of it. What I love about the Eameses is how resourceful they are."
Before he became a rapper, Cube studied architectural drafting. Perhaps Beyoncé and Jay-Z should commission him to come up with something a bit more hip-hop in the Hamptons.
