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:
8 Comments
good podcast. i know plenty of architects who work for developers, became urban planners, construction managers, municipal workers outside the building dept., and it is indeed counterproductive to say "they aren't architects anymore"(granted i have done it many times). it is indeed silly to state these people are not architects anymore,as if the training went out the window......another way to put what Liam might be suggesting.... now if we could only convince architects and academia to get their heads out of their asses, and I say this as a super proper licensed architect who learned a lot from an architect who learned a lot from an architect who practiced in the 1930's, custom everything/lawyer......the title needs to cover a lot more and in my mind traditonal studio shouldn't be more than 2 or 3 years to cover 'how to put a building together' (this would of course require academics who have actually practiced in real time, good luck filling that requirement) and most studios don't actually teach this.....then once you understand traditional architecture open it up to various pathways.....
interesting take, olaf, because my reaction was very different. this is one of the first of the archinect interviews that i just. couldn't. finish.
i sometimes get envious of these folks who can operate in the margins and work toward a redefinition of the profession. they're boundaries are more fluid and their paths less rigid than my own.
not this time.
this guy actually made me glad to be operating in a more conventional way within the profession. his ability to basically call any kind of narrative or process 'architecture' as if it's obvious - well, i couldn't go for that ride with him. i'll agree that a lot of what he described is architecturAL. but if he spends so much time chasing down potentially architectural threads among all of the various cultural, environmental, political fields he can explore, where does that leave him?
somehow in looking to expand the agency of the architect-type, he's got architects nosing around in everything but actually NOT digging in and taking responsibility for the follow-through. if it's all research and small interventions and critiques, that seems like it only *reduces* the agency of the profession. observers/recorders/critics of everything, experts in nothing.
thank goodness i've got to climb all over a real steel and concrete construction site tomorrow, making sure that what we envisioned is what is getting made, of good quality, out of real stuff, at a scale of real accommodation and shelter, for occupation and use by people!
Steven I get the margins description you give and lack of follow thru, this tends to be what "experimental research" is. and to be quite honest I was being kind in my simplified take because where I might say "data driven design"has been around for decades and is much of what real estate software,economists, stock brokers, etc...and architects who work daily in a real time market do- Liam makes it considerably more exciting and points in very different directions.......take Keller Easterling's writings. or when i discuss my ideas with legit economists and young neuroscients - everything out of my mouth or writing turns into "thats crazy, maybe its art?!?" and all I am really doing is being an "architect" in fields where its strictly science.... the new genre should be called Archifiction.........you don't need to really follow thru - just get it going, and someone will pick it up.......................: I forget his name and will not bother googling it, but a young Yale student once took a class, an art class, on tensegity, decades later when I was researching tensegrity this now research doctor was finding ways of curing cancer by looking at cell structure based on tensegity.........this is pretty much an architects training, like a random wiki page trail we can assemble disparate bodies of work into a future potential "field" or "paradigm" shifts - inventing new fields of study................ back to the training - if professors with actual knowledge and skills taught studios that did real architecture that Steven is climbing around in, you could understand the basics of the profession in 3 years max amd then on to conceptual and experimental to find alternate modes of operation. instead academia does a luke warm of both professional and experimental and produces very average and sometimes useless graduates or super specialists outside their field - in the end most of academia is a waste of time. you wpuld be better off as and Apprentice if you wanted to be a professional Architect and if you wanted to be experimental your degree could simply be called "Bachelors of Science and Liberal Arts in Design of the Environment"
Excellent comments, Olaf. I listened more, and I should clarify my thoughts. This guy is very smart and says very smart things. And the niche he’s carved out is fascinating and relevant, for sure. As I said in the first post, I envy people in these spaces of the profession.
BUT. By presenting his direction as somehow more relevant than the more normative part of the professional spectrum, he’s complicit in the disenfranchisement of the profession in shaping our built environment. He seems not to care about the built environment much, in fact, treating it as incidental – something better left to developers and municipal governments. Architects have become less engaged and recognized, as he says, but it’s BECAUSE of abdicating certain roles we used to play.
While we do spend a lot of our time interacting with networks, we do still occupy physical bodies that move and eat and play and need to be sheltered with a modicum of comfort. All the better if those places we do these things can become less responsible for the negative transformation of the earth/landscape he's observed and can possibly even improve it. I’m not ready to resign myself to a developer-designed and traffic-engineer designed world and disappear into SnapChat just yet.
A metaphor that occurred to me. In urban design the common narrative of the city is that the suburbs stretched out beyond and created a new/different kind of urbanism, leaving the tradition city behind. The suburbs thrived for a while and the cities hollowed out due to disinterest, disinvestment, and a sense that what they provided was no longer as necessary. What we learned is that the traditional city was the heart that kept the suburban things alive and with its decline, the suburbs also started to have trouble surviving.
In the same way, new models of practice are fascinating and vibrant and will allow us to learn and do new things. But the core of architectural practice is critical to allowing these expansions and explorations to happen. We shouldn’t neglect either end of the spectrum of what architecture can do.
Corny, I know. But...
Steven I see his points as more relevant than the "normative" because the "normative" has transformed into a nearly failed mode of operation with regard to influence on the built environment. I find this constant discussion of "outside the box" and this type of work coming from architecture school only further confirmation that from the AIA to academia the "normative" has not adapted accordingly and is failing, spiraling into disuse......hence my proposal on education of the architect. its full-on proper or full-on experimental - none of this lazy lukewarm mix of the two............... we have abdicated roles because we took the easier route - concept design and design intent only and for various legal reasons completely removed ourselves from designing all aspects of our profession, from business types to details that can be built..............the most naive and ridiculous common understanding in school is that "you will learn construction drawings in the profession". you will not for the most part because this mentality has gone on now for a few generations. now - its design intent only and no one knows how to make a drawing that means something with regard to construction. 3D fabrication makes this point all the more clear. 3D fabrication is this possibility for an architect to gain control again right? well why did the architect loose control to begin with.........the most basic skill of an architect is to draw and DRAFT, something just about every student does so poorly and to understand how to put materials together geometrically.......find me a graduate that can do that at a basic level.......
there is no "normative" really, because academia avoids it for the most part altogether, since most the academics never were architects to begin with,so either we get our shit together or branch out and provide an architectural education that qualifies you and is a requirement for roles the architect "has lost", remove the whole legal title and be on with it.
Steven further your point of about the IRLness of the built environment and need to engage with it / matter battles, I thought this interview wherein Deputy Director of the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory might be of interest.
Particularly this line...
"There's a notion that what worked for software on the Internet will now work for everything in society. I think infrastructure is really humbling particularly because of the reason that it's a clear example of when that doesn't work. You can't just hack a bridge. You can't just iterate on a bridge. When the bridge goes up, the bridge has got to work."
Not to say that Liam is specifically proposing a focus on the digital over the infrastructural. Perhaps digital infrastructures?
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