International Lecture Series: Liam Young

This lecture by architect and film directore Liam Young is part of the ‘International Lecture Series’ at the Royal Danish Academy where prominent international architects are invited to present their views on significant topics in architecture.

New Planetary Imageries

Following centuries of colonization, globalization, and never-ending economic extraction, we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. The dystopias of science fiction that previously read as speculative cautionary tales are now the stage sets of the everyday as many of us live out our lives in a disaster film playing in real-time. In this seemingly futureless moment, the storytelling performance 'Planetary Imaginaries' will take us on a sci-fi safari through a screenscape of alternative and hopeful worlds.

Slipping between fiction and documentary, the journey will be both an extraordinary image of tomorrow and an urgent illumination of the environmental questions that are facing us today.

About Liam Young

Liam Young is an Australian born architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Building his design fictions from the realities of present, Young also co-runs a nomadic research studio that travels location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures.

He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.