Rory Hyde’s Studio for Unsolicited Architecture has been working with Dutch architects DUS Architecten, posting ideas for unsolicited architecture on Rotterdam’s billboards. The team have been adding their suggestions – including a homeless wellness resort with treehouses and hot springs for the city’s homeless, and transforming city parks into golf courses for the elderly – to the boards used to advertise projects that are under construction in the city. The aim is to make the projects “more sustainable, more social, and more exciting”.

Hyde explains unsolicited architecture as “an alternative model of practice that is directed to social need, and not the whims of a client”, adding that, in spite of their skill and experience in manipulating space and material, architects are “impotently incapable of addressing the needs of society unless [they] have first been explicitly asked to do so.”

Rory Hyde is an RMIT graduate who was host and producer of Triple R show, ‘The Architects’, from 2004 to 2008. He has worked with ARM and BKK Architects and taught at RMIT and Swinburne University. He is now based in Europe.

DUS Architecten was founded by Martine de Wit, Hans Vermeulen and Hedwig Heinsman, and is based in Rotterdam.

First seen on Volume