The Break Dancing Bike Racks pay homage to the history of hip hop culture. Hip Hop has four main foundations: MCing, DJing, Graffiti and Break Dancing. JXTA’s Enviro Lab chose to focus on break dancing because as an expressive form of movement, one of its key intentions is to bring community together. The life-sized “dancers” were easily transformed into bike racks: the thick outlines illustrate individual break dancers, and the designs displayed within each figure are meant to portray the graffiti backdrops that b-boys and b-girls often perform in front of during dance competitions. Bike racks serve as homes to moving entities– bicycles. It’s only fitting to enliven these stagnant pit stops for our tools of transit with literal bodies in movement.

Enviro Lab Lead Sam Ero-Phillips directed the design of this project in the Enviro Studio. The models were first built by hand, then sturdier 3D models were created to test and expand upon these designs. Finally, Sam worked with two different fabricators to create and install the bike racks.