Travel needs to be about collective imagining.

If traveling provides us with a change of perspective, offering insights and experiences beyond the familiar, speculative architect and film director Liam Young takes this premise to another level. His expeditions with the nomadic design research studio Unknown Fields are cast as field trips into the future. Through his journeys, we get to visit the sites of resource extraction, energy production and global supply chains that often go unnoticed, but shape our cities, and are likely to do so even more amid the systemic shifts caused by climate change on a planetary scale.

 

While we talk, night has closed in on Los Angeles. Young himself has chosen this late hour because there are fewer distractions. He is video calling from the open living space of his mid-century house on the slope of Mount Washington, a residential area becoming popular among young Hollywood and members of the entertainment industry for its proximity to downtown and to the scenic walking trails up the hill. Behind him, through a vast window, the view of the night-lit city extends below. Somewhere among those streets, in the former fashion district, lies his studio. In the distance, one can imagine the Pacific.

 

Liam Young is having a busy year. His docu-fiction, THE GREAT ENDEAVOR, premiered at the Venice Architecture Biennale and is about to be shown on various streaming platforms, while his short film, PLANET CITY, which was once a TED talk and opened as a VR experience at 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, is set to turn into a graphic novel. Both projects have just been on show at his solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in his native Australia. As if this weren’t enough, he runs the Master’s in Fiction and Entertainment at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and works as a visual consultant for Hollywood productions such as the critically acclaimed sci-fi film, SWAN SONG.

 

Our conversation starts with his expeditions with Unknown Fields, which he co-founded with the architect Kate Davies in 2009, and moves on to his creative practice, where he builds on the visual footage, interviews and quantitative data from his travels both with Unknown Fields and his own film crew, and fashions it into speculative future scenarios. It soon becomes clear that his expeditions seem to be niche only at first. His practice of worldbuilding sits as comfortably in a highbrow art context as in the popular genres of film and fiction, and through the resourceful adoption of different outlets, his recent provocative tales of a planetary redesign have reached a wide and diverse audience.

Unknown Fields

Liam, with Unknown Fields you have visited rather uncommon destinations such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, container docks in a South Chinese harbour and the Baikonur Cosmodrome. What was the motivation for these expeditions?

 

L
Y

Unknown Fields is a collaboration between me and Kate Davies. We were interested in telling alternative stories about the contemporary city, and we wanted to unravel the stories that are fundamental in the shaping and framing of the modern city but don’t actually occur within the site plan of the city itself. Much of architecture focuses on the city as a discrete object and entity to be designed. What’s on the site plan is part of the thinking of the project, and what falls off its edges vanishes. But the modern city no longer occurs on a single site. All the contingent landscapes scattered around the world are fundamental in the making and shaping of that city: the mine site where that city begins its life; the trash heap where it ends its life; the various landscapes involved in feeding the city. None of these places look urban, but they are actually either produced by the city or themselves produce the city. Unknown Fields explores the idea that landscape design has collapsed into architectural design, product design, planetary design, and that thinking on any one of those scales involves an understanding of the interconnected systems and networks or global supply chains through which those scales exist. By mapping and visiting the landscapes that lie in the shadows, Unknown Fields starts to think about what it means to intervene in the city.

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So it is no longer sufficient, then, for an architect in London, an urban designer in Paris, or a landscape designer in New York to study the site of the project itself? They need to consider those distant landscapes?

 

L
Y

Totally. As designers operating within sites, we need to think about new forms of design practice, but also of representation, which deal with a new conceptualization of site, moving away from the bounded idea of the site plan to an understanding of the site of, say, London or Los Angeles as multifarious and atomized and ­existing across the entirety of the Earth. A viable model of a relevant contemporary design practice must involve some degree of travel or, at the very least, understand­ing of the planetary conditions in which we work. With Unknown Fields, we started making films and telling stories because it seemed the most powerful way of operating and connecting to audiences in order to represent that complexity and to present design problems and propositions.

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To what degree is Unknown Fields inspired by the tradition of the site visit in architectural education? Or is it rather a departure from it?

 

L
Y

The architectural expedition has always been fundamental to the discipline. That said, these modes of travel often involved a privileged architect dropping into some place, identifying a problem and attempting to solve it by overlaying a single solution across a context that has frequently been the subject of attempts to understand it through the microcosm of a single field trip. That imposition of singular, very often Western design perspectives on foreign contexts has been part of the Grand Tour narrative of Western architects traveling to the sites of antiquity or to the Orient as a means of finding inspiration or stealing ideas, and it is systemic within the discipline even now. Unknown Fields is striving to move away from that model and instead sees travel as a mode of listening, which privileges and acknowledges the people who have spent their lives in the places we visit and tries to understand them. We go to a place not to solve its problems, but rather to listen to and collect its stories, and we then use our platform and aesthetic practice to help amplify those stories and introduce new audiences to these contexts. It is a process of mapping and revealing the complexities within which we’re sitting, which are either hiding in plain sight, so commonplace that they become invisible, or are obscured behind the dominant media narrative, and of trying to create accurate images of what constitutes the present moment.

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You said that Unknown Fields started as a research studio at ­university, but then turned into a run-and-gun film crew. What does this mean, and how did this change come about?

 

L
Y

Unknown Fields began as an educational research project at the Architectural Association in London. We would bring in researchers, students, artists—people that were interested in collecting the stories of the places with us. The documentation initially involved forms of architectural research like drawings, mappings, more traditional forms of repre­sentation, but as we continued down the years, the questions that we were exploring oftentimes no longer required the techniques of architects and designers, but those of investigative journalists. Getting into a massive factory making Christmas decorations in Yiwu required us to pose as British buyers, and getting there with a camera required a narrative of the need to collect material to take back to our investors, or hidden camera photography. We soon ­developed practices for this; for ­example, when we were flying a drone over landscapes in India where the fashion industry was producing toxic dyes and dumping them directly into the river, we would capture that imagery, bring the drone down and swap over the SD cards in my pocket, because people would follow the drone and confiscate those cards with the threat of force. We had dummy cards filled with tourist photos that we would then visibly delete on site in front of those people, so that we could get out with the footage. At a certain point, it ­became unwieldy to drag 20 researchers through those narratives and into those situations. To be more nimble, flexible and incisive, we started to work with smaller crews. So Unknown Fields evolved into a run-and-gun film crew, very lightweight and built entirely to the specifics of the context and the stories that we were documenting. A whole network of fixers and local producers would help us get into places that cameras have never been before.

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What criteria do you use when ­selecting your destinations? 

 

L
Y

In choosing the places we go to, we often take an exceptionally literal view of the much used, almost cliched quote by William Gibson, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed: if that were to be true, then it must be possible to get on a plane and ­visit these little pockets of the future and report back. And that’s really what we’re doing. Let’s go there and unravel these weak signals. By selecting the sites we go to, we’re saying that they are fundamental to our future and our thinking of our future.

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