AAD Arguments: Liam Young

Liam Young will deliver the lecture “New Planetary Imageries” for AAD Arguments. Lydia Kallipoliti will provide the introduction and be joined by Michiel Helbig and AAD students to provide a response following the presentation and host a Q&A session.

Liam Young is an artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer who creates imaginary worlds as a way of thinking through the futures we fear, desire, and are already making. His visionary films and speculative landscapes act as rehearsals for the world to come, spaces capable of holding both our wildest aspirations and our most unsettling truths, where fiction becomes a tool for navigating the environmental urgencies of the present. Described by the BBC as “the man designing our futures,” Young also extends this worldbuilding practice across the film, television, and video games industries, crafting stories that remind us that the future is not a distant inevitability but an act of collective imagination.

His own films have premiered on platforms including Channel 4, Tribeca, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy, the Venice Biennale, the BBC, and The Guardian. His films, designs and costumes have been collected internationally by museums such as the MoMA in New York, the Smithsonian, SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Rome’s MAXXI Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, M Plus Hong Kong, Powerhouse Museum Sydney and many more.

In parallel to his work in art and entertainment he is in demand as one of the world’s leading futurists consulting on next generation technologies and design strategies for clients such as Nike, BMW, Google, Sony, Mitsubishi, Showtime, Microsoft, Ford, NASA JPL, L’Oreal, the Dubai Government, DHL and numerous others. Young’s worldbuilding practice is grounded in his academic research and he has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and currently runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angeles. He has published several books including Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth.

Organized by the MS in Advanced Architectural Design program as part of the AAD Arguments Lecture Series.