It's hyperbole, it's a provocation to talk about the idea of the architect's skills being wasted on building, but really what it's trying to get to is this idea that there has to be alternative forms of practice, that there's still going to be the architect-like character that does make real buildings and puts them into the world. But this isn't the core of the profession anymore. Welcome to Archniac Sessions 1-1. I'm Paul Piccrenio, and this week, November 30th, 2015, I'm joined by Archniac writer, Nicholas Carote, as we talk to Liam Young, founder of the Urban Futures Think Tank, Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, and co-director of the Nomadic Design Research Studio, Unknown Fields Division.
When he's not traveling to exotic locations around the world, Young splits his time between London, where he runs a course at the Architectural Association, and Los Angeles, where he's developing a new Master of Arts program in fiction and entertainment, as well as leading a studio at Zyark. Young, who started his career as a more traditional designer in Australia, now focuses on representing the strange and often disturbing effects of our globalized and technology-centric culture. Alongside Kate Davies, he leads designers to the edges of the world, from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the Bolivian Amazon, tracing the global supply chain. According to Young, the architect's skillset exceeds designing buildings, and he advocates for expanding the purview of the discipline.
For him, this involves extreme mobility. He arrived at our studio, Suitcase in Hand, having just returned from filming a sci-fi in Detroit on his way to catch a flight to London. A few days later, he was scheduled to return to Los Angeles to deliver a talk on the urbanism of Kim Kardashian. Alright, I hope you enjoy our conversation with Liam Young.
So, a few months ago, on our Connect contributor, reposted an interview you did at Tank Magazine, where you said, I think, that architect's skills are completely wasted on making buildings, but you don't see it as a weaking of the professional-based strengthening, and it created a big debate on our website. I was wondering if you could talk about that idea, and how that relates to your own experience of moving from a traditional architecture background to your practice now. I started out, I studied in Australia, I worked for some fairly traditional architects, a small little residential architect in Australia, and then moving on to spending time in the star architect system with people like Zaha, and working on these mega iconic projects around the world. And I was just increasingly frustrated with the timescale that most of these projects transpire across, and also their real inability to engage with the contemporary moment of the city, right?
To a large extent, those kind of traditional architectural projects really quite marginalised in terms of the forces that shape the contemporary city. So, in turn, the role of the architect also has become increasingly marginalised, so we've been looking for different forms of practice and alternative forms of projects that try and situate the architect back within systems and forces of change that make up and temporary spatial experience. And for the most part, that exists beyond the physical spectrum, beyond the act of making physical buildings, right? So it's hyperbole of provocation to talk about the idea of the architect skills being based on building, but really what it's trying to get to is this idea that there has to be alternative forms of practice, that there's still going to be the architect-like character that does make real buildings and puts them into the world.
But this isn't the core of the profession anymore, right? This is something that has become much more of a craft industry, a boutique world, open to a few people that have the budgets in order to commission an architect to make their projects. And if we constantly educate and train our students to think that this is the only way that an architect can operate, if these are the only forms of practice that we legitimise as a profession, then we're totally dead and destined to the annals of irrelevancy. So, as an educator, I think it's my duty to try and talk about different ways that we can make a living in this profession, right?
Because I do think that an architectural education is one of the most extraordinary that still exists in the world. And I think the things that we talk about and the ideas that we put out into the world are really critical and totally important. But the vehicle through which those ideas are disseminated and the context in which those ideas are deployed need to change. So, how would you define the architect of today, considering that the skills that architecture traditionally is employed by architects, is limited?
What makes this new breed of architect and architect just as much as the traditional architect? Yeah, I mean, what's extraordinary is that we spend seven or eight years studying to be an architect, maybe another couple of years trying to get registered, you can be a surgeon faster than you can be an architect, right? These skills end up being destined to design a beach house or some rich benefactor. Like, I think that what we're trained in through that process is the ability to abstract problem-solve, to put unlike ideas together into a continuous narrative, to engage with the world spatially.
And I see that there's interesting places where the architect can move into alternative disciplines where they can still act as the architect, but that the architect in politics, the architect as strategist, the architect as storyteller, and the architect as documentary maker, all of these territories are places where we can work in the way that we're trained to work. We can think strategically, we can think about the way that people relate to one another within space, but it doesn't have to happen around the built form as a core object, that everything is located within and structured around. It can happen within systems, engineered flows, networks, it can happen within the cycles and systems of political debate, town planning issues, all of these things architects, I think, can play really strategic roles within. But we very rarely have access to these industries in a meaningful way.
One of the main components of your practice is the design studio. You lead with Kate Davies through the AA, Unknown Fields Division. Can you talk about how you deploy these skills and how you teach them to your students on the field? I mean, it'd be part of what Kate and I do with Unknown Fields is we go out into the world and try to understand how it operates.
We're interested in this idea that architects have traditionally been involved in questions of sight and place. We design a building for a particular location. What we're interested in talking about in Unknown Fields is the idea that that site will place has totally changed in the same way that I was describing the city, and the forces that shaped the city as being very different to an architect traditionally operated within the medium of the building. So too is this idea of sight and place radically evolved where you can't think about a sight just by its immediate adjacencies anymore, a sight is a network condition.
So we are interested in thinking about London or reimaging London as a city, and the way that we do that is by traveling around the world to the different and dispersed landscapes that that city sets in motion and in turn the landscapes that shape our experience of that city. So to think about London, it's no longer sufficient to just look at that single point on a map, but you have to look at this atomized system of landscapes that are scattered around the world, energy landscape, resource landscapes, landscapes of production. These are all the conditions that actually make up contemporary city. So as architects, we need to go out into the world and find these conditions and report back and that's really about expanding an idea of place.
And then in turn, we can think about how the architectural project evolves in the context of that new idea of sight, where architectural projects now need to be much more scenarios, networks, conditions that transpire across timescales as opposed to buildings as singular objects. So with students, we take students almost like an artist, nomadic artists, and see out into the world to experience these sites. And then they make work, which is about engaging with the trajectories that we travel. It's about engaging with these conditions of complexity and multiplicity.
They make work that isn't building orientated, but is the illustration of scenarios. Maybe as an example, we could talk about your most recent trip, which as an interesting composer, I joined last summer to Bolivia and Chile. And we were explaining that, can you explain the place of that landscape within the global supply chain as you see it? Yeah.
I mean, we were interested in Elon Musk just declared this latest provocation that the world is going to be entirely solar powered in the next 10, 15 years. And it just happens that he's got the battery, that he's built to make that reality possible. And there's a whole discourse that is generated around that about green energy, energy futures. And we're interested in what the story behind those futures might be.
So when Elon Musk puts on the screen in front of an audience of tech head nerds and green energy, utopian's this diagram that shows how many batteries need to be made in order for this future to become a reality, what he doesn't show is how much lithium is required to produce those batteries. He doesn't show the landscapes behind the scenes of that diagram. So we traveled to the lithium triangle, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina as well, but we didn't get out to there to actually see where this future is going to be made. The landscapes that are going to construct this energy future that we're all going to be marching towards.
And it's extraordinary condition in order for Elon Musk really to realize that dream he basically needs to buy Bolivia. So Bolivia has 70% of the world's lithium resources, and they currently trapped under one of the various extraordinary landscapes on the planet, the Sala de Uni, which is this vast expanse of pristine, flat, white salt, so big and flat that it's used by satellites as calibration points. It's an extraordinary condition. And literally it is contained within it the future of energy on this planet.
So we thought it was critical for us to go out into explore that condition, to explore that infrastructure, to explore that landscape, a landscape very much on the point of disappearance. A landscape that's going to power out of Isis, laptops, phones, cars, houses, everything around your future. So what did you discover? It's quite extraordinary as a condition.
It really is trying, Bolivia's country is trying to imagine the role that these developing resource rich nations might play in these kind of futures. So the traditional model that we've seen around the world from Madagascar to Australia is that large scale multinationals own and operate these mines with local labor forces. The money follows the refinery process. So in the traditional case of lithium from Chile, there's a multinational that would run the mine, they take out the lithium brine, the raw material, then it would go to Korea and Japan, where it would find further into battery grade lithium and then turn into batteries, and then those batteries are sold back to the developing nations at extraordinary high costs.
So generally, the money in these resource nations gets disbursed and analyzed across the world. What Bolivia is trying to do, which is quite amazing as a condition, is figure out a way to nationalize that industry and keep the money internally. And they have one of the world's only indigenous presidents that's really a critical part in doing that. So we visited a series of pilot plans where they're setting up this process and trying to create an entirely new industry in the developing nation, which is all orientated around building a new kind of future for their country.
And it really is a totally different way of thinking about resources and wealth distribution. It's a totally different way of thinking about nation building. So it's an amazing condition. But we also see that it does also require that future of the nation a whole lot of compromises on these precious landscapes that have indigenous heritage wrapped up within them.
And what we get into is really in recent conversation about the sacrifices we're willing to make in the service of our shining, gleaming, technological future. Is that better than tar sands in the Yukon, the destruction of this extraordinary landscape in Bolivia? I don't know. I think that what we're trying to do is generate that discussion and debate, because it's not something which is a part of the traditional conversation of green energy.
There's no such thing as green energy. Just a myth. It's really about a system of horrible compromises, which ones we're willing to make and which ones we aren't. And that's what we try and do is through storytelling, fiction and narrative is illustrate those conditions that exist and frame them in a way that an audience can start to engage with them and make their own minds.
This framing you're talking about seems like the bulk of the architectural aspect or where you and Kate and your studio are positioned as designers or architects. Can you give us some examples about the types of outputs that have come out of the trip? Yeah. I mean, we're in this idea of the architect's storyteller in this case, or the architect's documentary.
And we really think that there's tremendous power in narration to make explicit some of the systems which are so fundamental in shaping this world, but that either exist in plain sight, that are so familiar, that you cease to become visible, or that are so large that it's hard to look at them with any kind of focus. So we think that through narrating them through this idea of system storytelling, we can kind of reveal the invisible and present it to an audience in a way that they can start to connect with. So we operate in the medium of the documentary or somewhere between the documentary and the fiction where we imbue these contexts, these landscape systems and these networks with a mode of potential. I use the phrase data dramatization, which is very different from data visualization, which is a currency we use to visualize networks and these kind of systems.
Dramatization involves the idea of trying to imbue them with emotional content so that an audience connects them in a different way. It's not just information, but it's much more visceral, much more immediate and you're forced to take a position. Would you consider that performance art? In some form.
I mean, it takes a form of film. Sometimes it takes a form of, you know, I do these storytelling performances as lectures. Sometimes it takes a form of almost news journalism essays that narrate our own journey in these contexts as sort of first person narratives and discovery. It takes a form of graphic novels, a developing graphic novel about the militarized landscapes of Mid-West United States.
Sometimes it's animation, sometimes it's all forms that fiction might take really. So in this particular case, we had a journalist from New Scientist come with us on the trip and that's evolved into a series of stories. We had marshmallow laser feast who some media artists based in London who brought out some 360 cameras that we put on board a flock of drones and we were flying them in various sites to create a VR documentary because I'm really interested in the capacity of VR to create these empathetic relationships with conditions. So we're developing a VR doc with a couple of other filmmakers, Jim Demuth and Posey Dixon, who also came out with us and that should drop sometime in 2016.
So the work we do takes a whole lot of different forms but at its core is this idea of reframing these conditions of complexity through narrative and that's about trying to connect an audience to these issues that we think are really critical. These kind of products also require a lot of pragmatic technical, they come along with a lot of pragmatic difficulties to get VR technology out to the Amazon for example, is really, really hard. Can you tell us a bit about how you, and that's something that's not a regular architecture professor would necessarily have to deal with in leading a studio. Can you tell me about how you guys plan these trips and the logistics that goes into them?
As you saw firsthand, these trips can sometimes be logistic nightmares and you do end up, we traveled for three days on a canoe up the Amazon River, we had massive cargo of weird drones and cameras, we had a floating drone repair shop at the back of the boat. I still think the nature of putting these trips together is an active architecture. We have to put a network of landscapes together in a sequence, we have to stitch together a narrative that starts to connect them and we have to put in place a network of collaborators, interesting people for us to talk to in order to illustrate and elucidate these stories that we think are really important to tell. They're really architectural acts, constructing narrative and stories out of a network of places and spaces.
So, a big part of what Kate and I do is that the logistics enterprise of putting these trips together. It has really really interesting relationships to these landscapes. We don't profess to go to these places as noble westerners trying to solve the problems of people out there that have been dealing with them for years and years, we're there for two weeks at a time generally. What we try and do is just put practitioners in the same room as all these people and listen to their stories and our role is really to document those stories and project them out into a world using these various different media.
So, and that's the nature of the practice really, and I think it's a really architectural and spatial one. So, Uninfield is just one aspect of your practice. You also run a think tank called Tomorrow's Lots of Day. Can you give us a background about what that is?
Yeah, I mean, I think if Uninfield is sort of a cinematic research division that goes out of the world and identifies certain trends and markers of things that are shaping contemporary futures, then Tomorrow's Lots of Day is a speculative design practice that takes those trends, exaggerates them and projects them into possible futures. So, we use the techniques from film, fiction and animation to narrate new kinds of stories or counter narratives that come out of these landscapes. So, we're just working on my film at the moment, which is based in what we call the Detroit Special Economic Zone, which is near future smart city of Detroit, but owned and operated by China, which really comes out of an interest in observations that we saw in our previous exhibition through China, where the economic model of Chinese cities, these special economic zones that are now being set up around the world gets exported back to Detroit, a city that was destroyed as industry was outsourced and moved back to China, which is now the place that's outsourcing back to the cheap labor markets of the US. And it comes out of the observations that we see Chinese-speaking economic zones emerging Eastern Europe in Africa, the irony being that actually the cheapest labor market for China now may be Detroit.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that movie I saw featuring Atlantic that talked about it involving Laidar shielding clothing? Yeah, I mean, the narrative of that film is really looking at what subcultures emerge in the context of new technologies. So, we're interested in all of these trends that we see playing out in the world that we've documented to some extent in unknown fields, they generate new forms of community and new sorts of relationships, and we're interested in the way that you can't distinguish technology from culture. So, we think really important to the architect is actually start to sketch out these new communities and look at how they operate.
So, the film in Detroit is over the course of one evening looking at a group of teenagers that by day work in one of the factories and by night, look for spaces within the smart city, within the systems of ubiquitous surveillance where they can find new forms of agency. So, it's riffing off the emergence of rave culture in the UK in the 90s, where does the warehouse rave scene start to emerge in the context of the smart city when everything is mapped, everything is digitized in the world of big data, where are the spaces that exist outside of the gaze of the city for people to do what they want to do. So, the idea of the project is that these spaces where the city can't see now exist within the spectrums of machine vision, no longer visible light. So, these spaces exist within the grain of the central city, but these groups adorn themselves in LiDAR camouflage costume, which disguises themselves from the future of photography, which is all based in laser scanning, LiDAR scanning.
They wear anti-facial recognition makeup and hairstyles, which means they dissolve in the eyes of the systems of CCTV, which are looking for facial features. They hack driverless taxis to go to areas of the cities that are being totally neglected and don't appear on the traditional maps that people use to navigate. So, it's all about finding the gaps in spaces within these new technologies where new forms of agency can potentially exist. Are these technologies that you guys are inventing for the film entirely speculative, or would, for example, these shiny fabrics actually protect one against these?
Yeah, I mean, all these materials have been developed to be totally legitimate and believable. I mean, that's the great thing about certain forms of speculative fiction, right? We're not interested in science fiction and shiny spaceships, skies and laser beams and lightsabers, and that's a form of escapers fantasy, right? So, we're interested in fiction that people can connect with, they can identify with, they can imagine so themselves within, and that's what we talk about being somewhere between the documentary and the fiction.
So, it's important for us that all these technologies do actually work, right? They're all prototypes, they're not just total fantasies. So, we have done a lot of research into the way that LiDAR operates, in order to develop these textiles with a series of silk weavers in London that actually do deflect and disrupt the LiDUS scans in really interesting ways. We were collaborating with Adam Harvey, who's a designer in New York, who has developed CB Dazzle, this anti-facial recognition makeup and hairstyles.
That actually does work within the constraints of facial recognition and algorithms that they end. So, it's really important that all of this work is grounded in the realities of the technology today and also the realities of the sites and contexts in which we're working. And that's why Unknown Fields is a critical part of the practice as well, is because it really is about going out to see how the world operates in some form, right? And this idea of exaggerating the presence or extrapolating from these things that we find and discover is a deliberate strategy so that all of the work that we do as architects isn't, you know, pure entertainment, but it's actually critical fiction.
So, that means something that can operate within the world with a degree of attraction. And I think a part of that is that they have to be connected to the world that stands. Is there an emerging technology that you're particularly fascinated with that may be informing the work that you're doing? I mean, I think we're really interested in the way that the network is shaping the city and it's not an emerging technology.
It's not like the latest hoverboard, which is coming out of something. But what we're only just on the edge of understanding is what the ubiquitous network means for us as a spatial practitioners, right? Like what does a city mean? What does a border mean?
What does a citizen mean? I mean, the context of this network which connects people in really unique and interesting ways. You know, what does that mean for the architect? I think is a really critical and urgent question where we no longer think of some of the other people's places and sites in terms of what we used to.
And the physical constraints of what makes them up. But it's all about network connections. It's all about virtual sites and landscapes. It's all about technology as a mediator through which we understand the world.
I think that's something that all architectures start to be considering. And it's something that also totally is changing the nature of the profession. As an academic, do you see that influence in architectural education these days in schools? No, no, no.
I mean, depends on the school, right? There still is this idea that students are going to study architecture. We're going to talk to them about how buildings work, how they put together. We can have really complex discourses around the formal language of those particular architectural projects and then they're going to go out into the world and get a job in an office, work their way up, become associated, become a director, buy a house car, a cat and a dog.
All are going to go out and start their own offices and win competitions and take over the world. And those patterns of career path are totally limited now. I mean, certainly they were when I first started teaching, which is, you know, around the time of the financial crash where the architect in Italy was working behind a counter in McDonald's to a certain extent we've recovered. But those architects that stayed in the profession after the recession.
Yeah, true. But I really think that career paths and those models are really quite marginalised. You know, the world's still going to need this type of practitioner in the same way the world still needs to leave it on handbags, but they're just going to be reduced to an increasingly decadent and irrelevant luxury. So it's much more interesting to think about new forms of education that can actually talk about some of these issues and to a lot of extent it's not happening nearly enough.
And I think it's actually a real act of negligence on our behalf of, if we're interested in running schools and teaching within schools that we're not engaging with these new forms of what architecture can be, right? Which mightn't have a physical footprint at all. Architecture is that operate within the depth of the screen. Architecture is that operate atomised across the planet that exists within the network or architecture that has multiple sites, one foot in a city like LA, but another that stretches all the way back to a resource landscape in the Congo.
And I think these are the new conditions of what make space today and architects fundamentally have to be engaging in those forms of space and creating and designing within them and critiquing them and trying to understand what does that mean. Central to that, I guess, would be the formation of an economic model that could support these new and alternative architecture practices. Did you foresee that happening and how would that operate? I mean, so much of architecture is just defined by this really antiquated relationship between a client and the architect.
So how could the new economic models be formed around these practices? I mean, I think that's a totally interesting and critical question. One of my dream projects is to do an architectural conference, which is totally just about business models, right? It sounds totally boring, but actually I think there's tremendous invention in how we all figure out ways to make living outside of the traditional client-based model.
Actually, maybe it's just a circle they operate in. I'm sure it is, but the vast majority of architects that I know don't make buildings as their primary concern. They self-initiate projects. They work outside the traditional service-based industry and they look for alternative forms of how do they work?
Or they co-op business models from other practices and they work within other disciplines parasitically? I mean, I think that's really interesting. Like when I talk about the dissolution of the term architect, what I'm really talking about is the way that the architect should distribute themselves in a whole series of aligned and associated disciplines. And again, I don't think that's about weakening who it is that we are as a professional body.
I think it's about finding much more powerful ways that we can engage with the world and the forces of change in that world. So I think I can see architects on the payroll of big tech companies, embedded within those systems, architects on public service payrolls that are embedded in government or in town planning offices, architects that operate within advertising agencies or in developer offices or aligned to those. All of those business models from these type of world I think we should be engaging with somehow, right? And not just hoping the phone will ring and some guys are going to call us and get us to design these museums and to buy.
I think it's totally pointless. I love that idea about the business model conference. I think the diversification of the architectural practice business model could actually be what could make sense to a lot of people of this new emerging type of architectural practice. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea of being an architect and doing anything but designing buildings.
But if we were to look at different ways of monetizing the skills and experience of an architect, I think it could be more easily seen at the industry is more diverse than it appears. Yeah. I mean, I think like how do you do that though, right? Like this bizarre little course that exists in every architectural school on the planet, which is called in various ways, you know, professional practice or like, you know, professional training or something.
It's this crappy little part of the program that students copy off their essays and exams from from past years. They treat it like a chore that they never have to turn up to. It's normally run by someone who no one knows the name of that's been in the practice for the last 40 years or something. But this should be the most vibrant and exciting experimental place of the architecture school, right?
Like we shouldn't dismiss a guard going to do the contract law subject. No idea. I can't wait to get back to studio. It should be totally experimental and we should be really inventing what the architect could be in that space.
It's interesting. You know, architects inherently are very creative people, but they tend to not be creative at all when it comes to issues like business. Yeah. We also totally self-sensit a discipline that is amazingly self-centrifying where we define more than anyone, what's in and what's without.
You know, like, no one cares what an architect really does. Like, we're really kind of anonymous profession to most people outside of the constraints of this podcast. But where are the ones that actually controlled it and constrained it and decide what the different forms of practices and what different forms of businesses? I mean, that's what we teach and that's just crazy.
I think it's much more interesting to bring people from outside the world of traditional architecture into a school to give a lecture and think that that to talk about all the different forms of practice. And then it's the educators role to think about the ways that we can design student experience so they can actually develop a fluency in some of those territories and actually start to define new parts that they make take when they leave the institution. I think all these things are absolutely managed of urgency. Yeah.
And it also means that we might actually make decent livings now as well. Yeah. It's also potentially a really selfish endeavor to try to figure out a way to do cool projects and get paid to do them as opposed to architecture being treated much like a hobby. Well, I'm guessing that the majority of architects out there are spending their time doing what they're not meant to be doing.
You know, I think that most architects that I've met are have a high level of skill or understanding in areas that their work does not take advantage of. It seems like those areas are where they can reinvent their business. It seems like one of the kind of constant expressions for architects is this fear that architecture is under threat from anything or the fear that architecture is losing its autonomy. I think a lot of people see these new models, these new practices as part of that.
I don't know if you've felt that if you perceive that. The horses are already bolted. Like, you know, the profession is already totally marginalised at the point of almost irrelevant to be honest, straight. Like, I think around the city, you know, that the forces of change in that city have passed us by.
The systems that used to shape our experience, you know, large kind of fixed forms of infrastructure, public squares and spaces, buildings of singular objects, you know, they're not the things that define having to pre-experience anymore. You know, the way that we navigate through technologies in our pocket, proximity to a Wi-Fi network or a decent phone signal is much more important than the nature of the form of a physical building. You know, that conversation has already passed, like whether we realise it or not, the architect and the traditional sense has already lost its extraction and its capacity to affect change. So we just, the world of technology is moving so much faster than we are.
So I think that's a really interesting kind of project like how architects position themselves within the line of technology transfer much more further along than what we are. So, you know, I think any conversation about how the profession is dissolving into these allied fields is really dated that it already has. And I think the task now is to figure out how we can gain much more agency in these fields that we've all dispersed into, how we can kind of be really recognisable as architectural practitioners in these worlds, as opposed to the guy that used to be an architect that's now working in government. You know what I mean?
Yeah. At the same time so many of the kind of traditional signifiers of architecture kind of get thrown out with this new technologically framed and enabled world ideas of divisions between outside and inside. So where does kind of, how does architecture kind of continue, form a continuity in today? I still think all of these questions that were fundamental to the traditional forms of architecture are still totally relevant, but it's just the medium through which those conditions play out have changed, right?
You know, there's still a question of boundary conditions between inside and outside, between one country and another country, jurisdictions. But these things no longer necessarily defined by the bricks and mortar of a physical wall, but might be defined by network connections, broadband speeds, who has tech certain technologies, who doesn't, what sites ones connected to. And I think to look with an architect's eye, to look spatially at these kind of conditions of technology in the same way that we did a city or a building before, I think is really important. So I don't think that the nature of the questions that we're interested in has changed.
I just think the medium in which those questions are being answered by the world has. And that's why I think that we need to be exploring these different forms of a fashion. Also we need to be engaging with different types of collaborators, network engineers, software designers, all of these sorts of guys become just as critical as the structural engineer was back when we were making buildings and design bridges. You know, the nature of infrastructure is changed architect always, we're about plugging into infrastructure in various forms.
Now that infrastructure is fiber optic cables, not freeway networks. And we need to be just as caddy about connecting into those systems as we once were the hard systems that used to make cities. At the same time, cities like Los Angeles also have massive housing shortages and that's a phenomenon that repeats many globalized cities or office cities. How do you see?
I mean, can you talk to that? Are there still needs to be obviously architects who do build? Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think, you know, there will be the architect as builder as one form of the practice, but it's just not just the architect as builder, you know? So I should actually clarify my seemingly the architect skilled or skilled or wasted on just making buildings, right?
Equally, in terms of conditions like housing shortages, I don't know if the architect in traditional form is the best guy to fill that role, you know, like, what does it mean for an architect to be embedded within a developer agency or an architect to be designing the urban rules and the tan planning regulations, which mean that any private builder or owner builder of a house can create something on their own terms within a set of constraints that ensure some positive condition for that area or suburban first place, you know, like if we design the strategies through which architecture emerges, as opposed to the architect designing the bespoke house over and over again, I think that's potentially a much more dexterous way that we can operate in the networked world. So it still is a concern with built form, but it just might be much more engaged at a strategic level than a material reality. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you're doing at SIR? The teacher.
Yeah, I mean, I think part of what we do is running studios in different institutions around the world. SIR seem like a really exciting place to start to operate within, because in a city like an LA connected into the industry that really makes the city famous, it seemed like a school that was more open than many to these different forms of practice that we're talking about. So we're setting up to launch in fall of 2016, a new post professional school within SIR, which has a number of different programs and courses. There'll be run, you know, architecture and urbanism, architecture and landscape, architecture and development, architecture and theory, specifically understanding up a new program which is looking at architecture and narrative fiction, architecture and entertainment connecting into the industry in the city, which is trying to continue to a large extent, the speculative work that we've been doing in tomorrow's thoughts today and the critical research that we've been doing in the unknown fields within the context of the extraordinary industry relationships that we can develop in the city.
Does this program have a name? Not yet. Yeah. So it's loosely called architecture and entertainment.
My shorthand for it is fear and wonder, which is taking on the description of science fiction as narratives of fear and wonder, which is talking about the way that speculative fiction both encapsulates our hopes and dreams for the world of the future, but also cautionary tales of worlds that we should protect ourselves from walking into. But it's really going to be about the way that the architect as storyteller can operate within the world. So we're going to be working in documentary, we're going to be working in the worlds of fiction and film, we're going to be thinking about terms and projects like world building, where we construct and work with the studio industry here in the city and construct and imagine speculative worlds through which new narratives start to play out. Such a really interesting and exciting new program, which is going to try and equip its students with the tools, the knowledge and the dexterity to operate as practitioners within these worlds of fiction, film, storytelling, documentary.
So hopefully it's a program that will do the sorts of things we've been talking about in the last half hour, trying to develop educational models that look to train different forms of architects that can go out into the world and operate within different disciplines. So for students that are listening to this, when can they apply for this program and what are the prerequisites for them? We do a full launch in January. It's a post-professional degree, so you have to have a do-in and allied profession before you come into the school, but it's going to be inclusive in its model.
So we're interested in people from a whole series of different backgrounds that might want to come into this world and use it as a platform through which to start to develop work and a career path into these different types of practice that we've been talking about. But yeah, we do a hard launch in January. So before we finish today, there's a question that we'd like to ask our interviewers at the end, actually our co-host Ken, who's not here today, started doing this and we'd like it quite a bit. Can you tell us what you're reading and what you're listening to these those?
To be honest, what I'm watching at the moment is crap movies on air lines. I wish there was something more involved in that. What am I looking at? What we're doing at the moment is starting to plan out our next unknown field expedition, which is going behind the scenes of the fashion industry.
And we're doing an expedition through Bangladesh and India, looking at cotton fields, looking at textile mills, garment production. So we're doing a lot of investigation reading around these economies of production right now. So we're trying to think about the way that closing production, the same way we thought about the supply chains of technology objects in China, the way that our desires and the consumption in a city like LA or London fuels and creates these new supply chains in India and Bangladesh. So we're reading a lot of economic stories and lots of readings around business models and supply chains models of fashion brands, things like that to try and understand how these systems work.
We were just looking at this extraordinary study that's been done of Zara, the fashion brand. Do you guys have that in the six? Yeah. The way that fast fashion works are as business model is based around being able to deliver to the high street stores, garments that have come off the runway faster than the brands that are designing the stuff on the one way themselves.
And the way they're doing it is they design almost immediately straight after a runway show, it comes out that they do a series of design garments. They then are cut in Bangladesh and India, the actual fabrics are chosen, the patterns are cut out. Then they put in containers and put on board a ship. And then on that ship, everything is sold together.
So they have factories in the cargo ships traveling across the oceans. But by the time they get to the port of Dover in London or Los Angeles or Oakland, the garments have been made. So they cut out the shipping time from their supply chain and they co-op the infrastructure of the global shipping network with garment production, which is an extraordinary way of rethinking how we might operate in the network world. And that's how they get stuff on the shelf so quickly.
So we're really interested in all of these different forms of business model and thinking about how that might change the nature of the design profession, how we can actually design within these globalised networks rather than just study them and be at one end of them. Or just how to design a more livable shipping container. I think I read somewhere that right after 9-11s took two or three days to replace all of the stock in New York stores with only all black though then. It's just like immediate.
Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, Zara do it purely based on a model of efficiency and economics. But what I think is really interesting is a series of speculative projects is to explore how as designers we might co-op that network in really interesting ways. What does it mean to redesign or reimagine this Apple MacBook that's sitting in front of us and design it with parameters that aren't about the seamless aluminium edge, how thin it is, how it will read in a by-line on a tech blog.
What if we designed it based on supply chain that brought it into being? In a way, they already are. But the conditions and the parameters that supply chain is reimagined under is based on labour costs, material availability, what if it was based on other kinds of conditions. It wasn't just about speed, but it was about the positive distribution of wealth or about the engagement with certain material economies.
I think that would be really interesting to develop a new aesthetic language for objects of the world that are actually based in the conditions of their production. So I think all the stuff we're interested in at the moment is trying to flesh out those observations and starting to develop much more knowledge about them so that we can start to deploy them as designers. So you have an event coming up tomorrow at the Met in New York. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
I mean, a big part of our practice is travelling around the world and preaching the word. As I mentioned, I do lots of lectures, but I try and avoid the shit I'd done, which most architects do, the PowerPoint presentation. He's a competition I didn't win, he's a chair, I designed. He's a renaissance painting that inspired this building that I also didn't get to build.
I'm interested in the architect as a performer, the architect as a storyteller. So I do these lectures like storytelling performances where I narrate projects that we've made and places that we've been into new stories that try and connect an audience in new ways to these conditions and try and reveal them and make them explicit in ways that they went before. So we're doing one of these performances at the Met on Friday. We're doing another one in here in LA at Siaq on Wednesday 28 October, which would be a three-screen multimedia assault on the senses where I do live sound mixing and really narrate a story.
In this case, the one I've been working on recently is called City Everywhere, Kim Kardashian in the Dark Side of the Screen, where me and a fictional Kim Kardashian go on a journey through a fictional city which has stitched together from landscapes. We visited with unknown fields across the last few years and a series of speculative projects that I've developed with some of the most thoughts today that come out of those landscapes. They're stitched together to create this idea of city everywhere, which is really trying to interrogate this new model of sight and place that we've been talking about that's distributed across the planet. And Kim Kardashian seems to me to be the iconic figure of this new networked world.
It's me and Kim Gowna. You want a wild tour? I have to go to that. Yeah, it'll be fun.
I've been thinking about everything Kim Kardashian is this encapsulated in her everything we need to know about this new world and relationship to technology. Because Kim, just like the buildings we design and the people that we are, isn't just the physical makeup of herself. It's not just the flesh that we call Kim. It's the media presence that she generates.
Kim is this person that has two feet planted in the real world, but she casts this shadow across the digital spectrum, across Instagram, across Twitter, across Facebook, across our screens. And to understand Kim, to understand people like us, to understand the buildings that we design in the cities we inhabit, you have to look not just at the physicality of what makes her up. You have to look at the network that she sets in motion. So I use Kim as this icon of today.
Kim Kardashian has the key architectural figure. It's probably a better answer to your question. One of my reading late, Kim Kardashian's selfie book is the most recent thing I've bought from my Amazon wish list. I don't really want to see this totally decadent bullshit book, but it says so much about who we are that this thing was brought into the world, Christ.
Do you watch Keeping Up The Kardashians, too? Religiously. I'm starting to shift on. I'm starting to get more interested in some of the other Kardashians now.
I think they're doing more interesting stuff. Chloe. Chloe. Well, talk about a road to self-destruction, totally.
By saying. One of the great things about being in the city is just being close to the Kardashians. Yeah. Oh, they're the world they said in motion.
That's a dystopian point to the end on goodness. Yeah. A good one. Definitely.
Well, thanks so much for joining us today. No, thanks very much. Thanks for listening to our one-to-one interview with Liam Young. Danello, Voynoff, edits the podcast, and Matt Scaling's composed the music.
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