Archinect - News

Liam Young presents vision for high-density sci-fi metropolis with 10 billion inhabitants

2021-10-08T11:40:00-04:00

The director and speculative architect Liam Young has launched a new project, speculating on the future of urbanism within the context of climate change and urban sprawl. The project, titled Planet City, presents a future world in which urban sprawl is reversed, and humanity retreats to one densely populated city, allowing the world beyond the city’s borders to re-wild and rejuvenate.

The hypothetical project is presented through a 15-minute short film and an associated book publication. Young also presented the project in a TED talk released in August of this year. The film presents scenes from life in the city, which sees a population of ten billion people supported by renewable energy sources, pumped hydro storage, and the utilization of algae as a food and filtration system. Young has designed the city as a “closed-loop system” which is waste-free and constructed entirely of recycled materials.

Algae lakes. Image: Liam Young

For Young, the city is a critique of hundreds of years...

Strelka announces "The Terraforming," a research program headed by Benjamin Bratton

2019-08-27T17:45:00-04:00

The Moscow-based Strelka Institute has announced a new research program geared toward exploring the issues of planetary urbanism, global energy infrastructure, “geotechnology,” and speculative design, among other topics.

Directed by professor and theorist Benjamin Bratton, the three-year program will be tuition-free and will explore the topics above as part of a multi-disciplinary effort involving both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The initiative, The Terraforming, seeks to approach the future inhabitation of planet Earth a literal world-building exercise. A website announcing the program explains: "The term 'terraforming' usually refers to transforming the ecosystems of other planets or moons to make them capable of supporting Earth-like life. However, the looming ecological consequences of human activities suggest that in the decades to come we might need to terraform our own planet if it is to remain a viable host for Earth-like life."

A focu...

Geoff Manaugh joins Liam Young at Archinect Outpost to discuss the just-released book Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene

2019-03-14T14:21:00-04:00

Join us at Archinect Outpost on March 23th, from 7–9pm to host Liam Young and his newly edited book: Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene.

Young and Geoff Manaugh will be in attendance to present their thoughts on the book, followed by a book signing. Machine Landscapes can be preordered from Archinect Outpost here.

You can RSVP here to reserve your spot at the event.

From the publishers at Wiley Books: "Machine Landscapes surveys the architectural spaces in the world that are now entirely empty of people. The data centers, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialized agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis."

New City, Liam Youn...

Stories from the Anthropocene: Archinect Sessions One-to-One #4 with Liam Young

2015-11-30T15:29:00-05:00

Architect and educator Liam Young joins Paul Petrunia and Nicholas Korody in the Archinect studio for this week's One-to-One. Young, a kind of architect-non-architect (his definition of the role may vary), concerns his design and creative work with the anthropocentric futures of our globalized society, in architecture, energy, and technology.

Standard among his many roles are co-director of the AA's Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio, and founder of the urbanism think tank, Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. Current projects include developing a new masters program at SCI-Arc in fiction and entertainment, and leading a studio at the AA. Special thanks to SCI-Arc for helping set up the interview.

Listen to our One-to-One #4 with Liam Young:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
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RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Do...

Liam Young's triple feature: review of "City Everywhere" at SCI-Arc

2015-10-29T14:08:00-04:00

A presentation about a world that is increasingly mediated by screens and digital conceptualizations of space on three screens with digital conceptualizations of space is not just meta: it was the engaging and immersive format of Liam Young's lecture/performance Wednesday night at SCI-Arc, "City Everywhere: Kim Kardashian and the Dark Side of the Screen." Young's fair warning to the packed lecture hall that the live sound mixing of his narration and syncing of three separate video feeds might go awry turned out to be unnecessary; the presentation was flawless while simultaneously visceral, a kind of Purple Rose of Cairo experience for architectural discourse. The pervasive reach of the internet makes us all actors in this particular film.

Young's presentation was a quasi-fictional tour of "a city that is hiding in plain sight," which is to say the current urban and mental space(s) that we inhabit thanks to the reality of digital mediation. The most shocking and resonant example of t...

Liam Young: "an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings"

2015-07-20T12:01:00-04:00

Listen, I advocate for an utter dissolution of the term architect. I think an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings. But I don’t see it as weakening the profession, I see it as strengthening. It means that the profession can find traction in other fields: the architect as strategist, as politician, as planner; the architect as curator or editor or writer, as activist or storyteller. Finding ways to operate in other disciplines just gives us much more agency.

This is the direction we're headed and I agree with it. If you want to design and erect buildings, be a Registered Architect. If you get the education of an architect and want to improve the world in all kinds of other non-materiallly-based ways, you're an architect.

h/t to Javo Cado.