Artist and Architect Liam Young: My Solutions Are Not Polite

Why It Matters

Young’s call for speculative, planetary‑scale architecture redefines the profession as a decisive force in steering technology‑driven urban futures, directly impacting climate policy, investment decisions, and public imagination.

Key Takeaways

• Architecture must evolve faster than cultural understanding of tech.
• Architects can act as translators between technology, policy, and society.
• Speculative design and sci‑fi world‑building anticipate emerging tech impacts.
• Planetary‑scale “punk” narratives replace outdated localist environmental visions.
• Film and storytelling become tools to shape collective future aspirations.

Summary

Liam Young argues that today’s "before‑culture" technologies outpace society’s ability to comprehend them, demanding an architectural practice that moves at tech’s breakneck speed. He positions architecture as a rare interdisciplinary bridge, capable of translating between engineers, scientists, filmmakers, and policymakers, and critiques the profession’s drift toward exclusive, boutique projects for the wealthy. Young stresses that architects must abandon traditional building‑only roles and embed themselves in the systems—digital platforms, autonomous networks, and planetary supply chains—that now shape cities. By adopting speculative design and science‑fiction world‑building, practitioners can prototype the social and infrastructural consequences of emerging technologies before they materialize, turning imagination into a strategic planning tool. He cites William Gibson’s line, "The future’s already here; it’s just not evenly distributed," and describes his own global fieldwork—from rare‑earth mines in Inner Mongolia to e‑waste sites in Africa—to ground‑truth these uneven futures. Young also introduces "planetary punk," a new narrative genre that scales beyond 1960s‑era localist environmentalism to address climate‑scale challenges through bold, cinematic storytelling. The implication is clear: architects who adopt rapid, speculative, and globally aware practices can reclaim relevance, influencing policy, investment, and public perception of technology’s trajectory. Their work becomes a catalyst for shaping shared visions of a sustainable, equitable future rather than merely designing luxury monuments.

Original Description

“I'm exploring visions of our future.”

We have met Australian architect and artist Liam Young, whose work goes far beyond single disciplines and negotiates the time we live in – the age of poly crisis.

”The scales of crises that we might be trying to engage with no longer exist at the scale of nation states. They exist at planetary scales. And the globalised world means that nothing occurs in a

single point on a map anymore."

”I really think at this moment, we don't really have any shared visions of what our collective aspirational futures should look like. And I think film plays a critical role in doing that. I really think that the futures we imagine end up becoming the futures that we live in.”

To Liam, architects can play a vital role in confronting these current challenges – far beyond shaping new buildings and physical surroundings:

”Architecture is this really interesting discipline that sits in between culture and technology. You could be an artist as well as an engineer and a scientist. But what's happened is that the architect as a figure has increasingly been marginalized. Today, the way that we connect and relate to each other in public space is no longer conditioned by an urbanist or an architect making

that space. It's conditioned by a dude in a hoodie and sneakers setting their own rules for public discourse, deciding what's allowed, what's not allowed, and what can be monetized.”

“Architecture is traditionally an incredibly slow medium, whereas technology is coming at us at speeds faster than our cultural capacity to understand what they might mean. So, we need to develop a new set of skills as designers and architects to cope with that pace.”

“I use the analogy that the future ahead of us is a dark, shadowed, and unknown territory. And every story, every film, every narrative that we might construct or talk about that future through is like a tiny little torch beam illuminating, a little sliver of that landscape ahead of us. And the more stories we tell – positive, negative, utopian, dystopian – the more of that landscape becomes illuminated.”

Liam Young (b. 1979 in Australia) 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 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. He co-produced the documentary Consumed, nominated for Best Short Film at the 2017 BAFTAs, and wrote, designed, and directed the sci-fi film Planet City, which premiered at Tribeca in 2022 and is the subject of his TED Talk, now viewed by almost 3 million. 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, 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 groundbreaking Master of Fine Arts 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.

Liam Young was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conversation took place in February 2026.

Camera: Simon Weyhe

Edit: Nanna Dahm

Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner

Music via Upright Music:

Stronger

Composers: Jack Ruston, Ben Townsend

Below the Radar

Composer: Morten Thorhauge

Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

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