For the Public Good: Rebuilding the Architectural Profession’s Social Contract

Abstract

What use is the business of research, when the business of architecture is on its knees? Rory Hyde – Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Design Advocate for the Mayor of London – argues that architectural research can be a vehicle for escaping architecture's current traps: by asking new kinds of questions, developing new kinds of practice models, and rebuilding the social contract between the profession and the public.