Yeezy does it: what to expect from Kanye West's new architecture firm Yeezy Home

He’s best known for his chart-topping raps and colossal ego, but Kanye West will soon be branching out into architecture.

This month, the musician and fashion designer revealed plans to expand his multi-million dollar fashion company Yeezy with a new arm, Yeezy Home, tweeting a call-out for “architects and industrial designers who want to make the world better”.

West, 40, has been open about his love affair with architecture throughout his 14-year career, insisting during a BBC Radio 1 interview in 2013 that he is a “product person” and “shouldn’t be limited to one place of creativity”.

That same year, he visited the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he stood on a desk and proclaimed his belief that “the world can be saved through design”.

The hip-hop supremo’s sixth album Yeezus was heavily influenced by Brutalist architecture and minimalist design.

During its production, West visited a furniture exhibition in the Louvre five times, sometimes privately.

He had “rare Le Corbusier lamps, Pierre Jeanneret chairs and obscure body-art journals from Switzerland” delivered to the Paris loft he lived in while working on the critically acclaimed record.

“This one Le Corbusier lamp was, like, my greatest inspiration,” he told the New York Times.

“I would go see actual Corbusier homes in real life and just talk about, you know, why did they design it? They did, like, the biggest glass panes that had ever been done."

The lamp in question is believed to be the curvy, concrete Borne Béton, originally designed as an outdoor light for Le Corbusier's hugely influential 1952 Unité building in Marseilles.

West’s designs will, above all, be as functional as possible; structure and proportions were at the heart of French modern architecture pioneer Le Corbusier’s style. His most famous quote is “a house is a machine for living in”.

Nevertheless, we can expect West to experiment heavily with Yeezy Home.

Fresh from a visit to Le Corbusier’s 1929 Art Deco masterpiece, Villa Savoye, with its ground-breaking ribbon windows, flat roof and reinforced-concrete frame, he proudly declared “F**k you!” his new motto.

“I bet there were people at the time who said to the owners of this house, ‘Why would you spend your money on this?’” he told W Magazine.

“Those people, I bet you that today nobody is visiting their house.’”

The rapper worked closely with boundary-pushing Romanian architect Oana Stanescu, who fascinated him with her insights into Le Corbusier's radicalism.

Stanescu went on to design the enormous “travelling mountain and LED sun” that dominated the stage on his Yeezus world tour.

West’s Yeezy HQ, which we recently got a glimpse of in a 16-page PIN-UP feature, cements – literally, because concrete takes centre stage — the architectural route he will most likely go down.

The Seventies-style warehouse in Californian suburban wasteland has black-mirrored glass, polished concrete floors, fluorescent lighting, utilitarian black-stained bookshelves, MDF worktables and cast-concrete benches inspired by motorway bridges. There is no colour.

It was designed by West’s long-time collaborator, multi-disciplinary designer Willo Perron, who describes it as “post-core as core…about looking at the mundane things of every day and reappropriating the strip mall of re-contextualising things that we once thought of as ugly”.

Then there’s the rapper's expansive Hidden Hills family home, designed by Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoodt, which he shared mid-renovation photos of on social media in April.

Polished concrete dominates again, with arches and vaulted ceilings reminiscent of a grand mausoleum.

The 15,000 sq ft mansion’s interiors, as expected, are heavily minimalist and full of light, in a nod to Vervoodt’s signature style.

West also owns an enigmatic Manhattan apartment, designed by Italian minimalist architect Claudio Silvestrin.

Neutral and clean-lined throughout, the fully open-plan space has a solemn, church-like feel, with the A-lister telling Vanity Fair that “Zen, monochromatic palettes” are “important for his sanity”.

In West’s words, he is “a minimalist in a rapper’s body” who wants to “bring as much beauty to the world as possible”.

Watch his space.