Architecture trains us to do much more than design buildings, says Liam Young. There’s a responsibility to use those skills for the good of the whole planet
Liam Young’s estimation of the architecture business is mixed. He feels his ‘really conservative’ education at the University of Queensland (‘I learned how to do timber detailing on residential houses and argue about medium density in Australian suburbs’) provided him with valuable skills to operate in spheres well beyond architecture’s traditional stamping grounds. One example he gives: ‘Among our great capacities as architects is that we can synthesise ideas from the world of science and technology with concepts and visual narratives from culture and art practice.’ Another, perhaps proven by his own eloquence despite having been ‘a very shy kid’: ‘Architects have always been great communicators, and that’s part of how we’re trained.’ With caveats for those in social justice, social housing and sustainability, Young is less keen on how many architects employ those skills, putting their practices at the service of capital: ‘There have to be other ways we can deploy our really extraordinary knowledge and capacity to engage in important questions, rather than making trophies and trinkets for the rich.’
At this year’s BFI London Film Festival, Young’s The Great Endeavour – a collaborative undertaking involving scientists, technologists and creatives – is on display at the open-access, immersive Outernet next to Tottenham Court Road tube station. Described in the press release as an ‘inspiring cinematic experience’, and by Young as ‘a science illustration project’, it depicts the building of a new global infrastructure – one as extensive as that of today’s fossil-fuel industry – to remove atmospheric carbon. For Young, this undertaking will be ‘this generation’s moon-landing’, requiring international consensus and co-operation. He characterises his belief in the feasibility of this ‘new planetary imaginary’, replacing the West’s shipping of its environmental problems to the Global South, as both ‘deep pragmatism’ and ‘radical optimism’.
Climate change, Young says, is no longer a technological problem, but a cultural and political one. To address this ‘crisis of the imagination’, a shared narrative about technology, and about our collective futures, is desperately needed. His previous ‘world-building’ movie, the acclaimed if controversial Planet City, portrays a single hyper-dense megacity, leaving the rest of the world as a massive, recuperating wilderness. The goal of these projects is to generate conversations around the necessity of radical solutions, rather than offering blueprints: ‘Even if people revile such densification, at least we’re talking about one version of the future, which is degrowth, and living more compactly.’ Another version, it turns out, is to stop reproducing and shrink the global population, raising ‘big, tough questions, like who gets to have kids’ – which, he agrees, would make for a really controversial film.
For Young, all these conversations need to happen rapidly, and outside the sparse realms of architectural-monograph buyers and film-festival attendees, with the coded, gated languages of architecture and climate science replaced with another of Young’s neologisms, data dramatisation: ‘If you really want to make work that engages with future issues, things like global climate collapse and the broad structural changes required to dig ourselves out of various apocalypses we find ourselves in, then one route is exploring speculative narratives in forms that are disseminated to a more general public and play on the forms of fiction.’ The scenarios can appear dystopian – ‘the work of a Bond villain’ – thus the cinematic sublime is used to capture the imagination, and question our shared conceptualisations of our future, whether glass and steel topped by unlikely treescapes, ineffective low-carbon policies, or the localism of 1960s environmentalists (‘We failed them … but we’re not going to solve the climate crisis by growing tomatoes in our back yard’).
In 2018, to further these ends, Young moved to Los Angeles to embed himself in the entertainment industry, feeling that its mediums and the discipline of architecture were moving ever closer together. The relocation has brought drawbacks and opportunities: ‘I thought architecture was conservative, but it’s got nothing on the film industry. But that’s why I think it’s a space with great potential, because it’s very easy to walk into a room and to be the one person that’s filled with ideas.’ There, he’s set up the innovative Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc, creating scaffolding and shortcuts for students, particularly those without the wealth and privilege associated with architecture schools, ‘to achieve escape velocity and go out and work in different kinds of territories’. Neoliberal narratives along the lines of ‘create the practice you want to work at’ cause particular ire: ‘It’s just ridiculous for someone without a trust fund.’ He sees many graduates ending up in, and ideally suited to, the video-gaming and digital worlds, where ‘architects and designers … have extraordinary capacity for power and change’. He explains, ‘Immersive media, video games, VR, AR, these aren’t filmic mediums. The language of cinema doesn’t really apply, but the language of space does … of threshold, scale and transition. This is the language of architecture.’
It’s part of Young’s wider commitment to teaching, with professorships at Cambridge, Princeton and MIT, and roles at many other institutions: ‘I wouldn’t say I enjoy it exactly, but I see it as a responsibility, I’m trying to practise what I preach … If I’m talking about issues with the ways that architecture is taught or its institutionalised problems, then I have a responsibility to be involved in creating other teaching models and forms of practice that help train another generation of designers to do this kind of stuff.’ That ‘stuff’ is where he sees architecture going: ‘One of the great tragedies of the profession is that we’ve defined ourselves so narrowly – as solely involved with the making and shaping of buildings as physical objects.’ Architects should instead see their training as multifarious, particularly given the shared if unspoken understanding that ‘the real stuff you learn is stuff that happens when you finally get to an office’. With the shrinking numbers of graduates getting licences, this expanded scope would strengthen the profession, offering other areas in which to be useful and productive, among which he numbers not just entertainment and culture, but also consultancy and politics.
It all sounds a bit like Young’s own career, which he characterises as ‘a lifetime of hustle to find a way that this type of work supports itself and sustains a life.’ That included a stint at Zaha Hadid Architects, where he found that those things he wanted to talk about – ‘the imminent arrival of autonomous vehicles, drone technology, AI governance, all these things destined to define and shape urban experiences and cities in our lifetime’ – were a sideline: ‘The conversations in what was supposed to be this extraordinary forward-thinking office were on form, shape and icon.’ It has also included time spent as a ‘futurist or design consultant’ for Ford, Mitsubishi and others, but this multifaceted life is, perhaps, not quite as unusual as it once was: ‘People used to characterise the work I do as being on the margins, but I think that the pendulum has decidedly swung, to the point where the people that graduate and follow the traditional path to licensure, depending on the school, can often be in the minority.’
Despite all this, Young views himself very much as an architect – ‘I still write that on my customs forms’ – and his work as ‘directly shaped by my grounding in architecture’, framed by his belief that ‘making buildings is just one thing that architects do’. Given his proficiency as interviewee and TED talker (‘seen by 3 million people’, he informs me), most of the responses I elicit have already had multiple roll-outs, which, although mildly ego-deflating, is entirely understandable. So if you want a more complete, more serious and probably more accurate account of his voluminous thinking, just google ‘Liam Young’, and prepare to concentrate.
The Great Endeavour is on display from 11 to 27 October at The Outernet, Tottenham Court Road, London, as part of this year's BFI London Film Festival. Access is free.