Liam Young

Using speculative design, film and the visualisations of imaginary urban environments, he opens up conversations about urban life and poses questions about the roles of both architecture and entertainment. Young has described his approach as that of an architect who works like a science fiction author or futurist. Through his projects that escape traditional definitions of how an architect practices, Young has caused some controversy in the architectural field and the comments section on the industry blog Archinect with his claim that "An architect's skills are completely wasted on making buildings".

• Name — Liam Young • Born — 13 March 1979 • Birthplace — Australia • Occupation — * Film director • architect • Website — liamyoung.org

Young is a founder of the Urban Futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today and the nomadic research studio Unknown Fields. Young was previously a visiting professor of architecture at Princeton University, and currently holds a position at the Architectural Association in London and runs the M.A. in Fiction and Entertainment at the Southern California Institute of Architecture with Alexey Marfin in Los Angeles.

In 2014, Young collaborated with Welsh musician and composer John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground to develop the world first drone orchestra and the audiovisual performance LOOP >> 60 Hz: Transmissions From The Drone Orchestra. For the performance Young designed a flock of costumed drones that would fly above the audience carrying speakers that broadcast the live music played by the band. As The Guardian notes, the project "brings drones out of the realms of sinister terrorist surveillance and Amazon delivery and puts them in front of your face like massive alien gnats". In a review of the performance in The Telegraph the collaboration was described as "demented joy", a cross between an amateur airshow and a rock concert. With British electronic producer Forest Swords Young developed In the Robot Skies, a live cinema performance of his short film of the same name. Against the backdrop of Forest Swords original soundscape and a film collage directed by Young, he narrates the story of a lone drone flying across time and space. Beginning in WWI the performance tells the story of how drones have evolved across time to become the dominant infrastructure they are today. The performance premiered at the 60th London International Film Festival.

Young's first US solo show opened at the Columbia University Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in March 2017. The show was titled New Romance and featured 3 short films, each a love story set in a future city of autonomous technologies. The exhibition uses the medium of film and fiction to explore how emerging technologies are redefining human relationships and architecture. The worlds of each of the 3 films are extrapolations of the trends and weak signals of our present relationship to technology. The films present a dystopian future of ubiquitous technology but no matter how bleak the stories attempt to show that we can still imagine ways to bend technology to our will or escape from it through tiny acts of resistance. With his nomadic studio Unknown Fields, Young exhibited Unknown Fields: The Dark Side of the City at the Architectural Association Gallery in 2016. The exhibition took the form of a road trip through a collection of fragments: of drone footage, hidden camera investigations, speculative narratives and toxic objects that formed a reimagined city the size of the entire planet. The project looks at the way that the supply chains of technology are reforming landscapes all over the world. One of the works in the exhibition, Rare Earthenware, a set of radioactive vases made from the amount of toxic waste generated in the production of technology, has since been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum for their ceramics collection in London.

• 2013: Chupan Chupai (Short; producer) • 2014: New City (Video installation, director) • 2016: Where the City Can't See (Short; director) • 2016: In the Robot Skies (Short; director) • 2016: Consumed (Short; producer) • 2017: Taobao Village (Video installation; co-director with Alexey Marfin)

• Crane TV Interview • Building Better Entertainment By Holly Willis for Filmmaker Magazine • Liam Young on Speculative Architecture and Engineering the Future By Next Nature • Arch20 Interviews Liam Young by Zack Saunders • Liam Young is an Architect who doesn't believe in architects. Interview with Shumi Bose for Tank Magazine • The Model is the Map, is the Territory by George Kafka for Transmediale

Liam Young is recorded as designer, architect and film director. Recorded at birth as Liam Peter Young.