Introduced by the BBC as the man designing our futures, Liam Young co-founded the Urban Futures Tomorrows Thoughts Today think tank and the Unknown Fields nomadic research studio, a project that sees the architect not as a mere designer of buildings but rather as a strategist, planner, activist, director, and curator. In Young’s speculative architectures and visualisations, new technologies like drones and laser scanners become objects of narration themselves, capable of writing new stories connected to urban issues and the implications of technology on space both today and in the future. Young’s research on Accelerationism is robust. However, it is not reflected in the idea of pacified “smart cities,” where technology is viewed as the savior of daily life. Rather, Young’s work focuses on the interpretation of reality through “machine landscapes” – places of extraordinary complexity where individuals must learn to negotiate their space.
