Seeing the world through storytelling, Liam Young is more than a contemporary architect and filmmaker: he builds worlds between design, fiction, and futures. As an artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer, Liam creates imaginary worlds as a way of thinking through the futures we fear, desire, and are already inhabiting. Described by the BBC as "the man designing our futures," his speculative films and research map the architectures of our Post-Anthropocene reality, a state of the world where human entanglement in landscapes blurs the boundaries of nature and culture. Data centers, sites of material extraction, and machine landscapes quietly construct our world, a choreography of humans and technology.

His films have premiered at Tribeca, the Venice Biennale, and the Royal Academy, and been broadcast by Channel 4 and the BBC, while his work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, the V&A, and Rome's MAXXI Museum, among many others. That same world-building practice extends into film, television, and games, as visual consultant on Apple's Golden Globe and BAFTA-nominated Swan Song, starring Mahershala Ali and Awkwafina, and into industry, with clients ranging from Nike to NASA JPL, Google to the Dubai Government. Liam's visualizations aid us in seeing the futures that are already here. As Director of SCI-Arc's Master in Fiction and Entertainment programme, following guest professorships at Princeton, MIT, and Cambridge, he is shaping the next generation of futurists.

In this conversation, Liam reflects with COTF on world-building as a critical design practice, the shifting role of architects amid automation, how storytelling can reclaim agency in a planetary system designed by machines, and how we can become stewards of the earth, toward a planetary citizenship.

Interview by Asiel Nuñez |‍ ‍Edition by Candela De Bortoli | ‍Images and videos courtesy of Oyler Wu Collaborative

Your work keeps coming back to the idea of the puzzle. What draws you to it?

Dwayne Oyler: A puzzle is first and foremost something that engages you. It forces human interaction—you want to solve it. It requires that you get in there, understand it, interact with it physically. It is a process of learning and discovery, shaped by the geometry, the clues, and the way the parts describe themselves. It's also inherently aesthetic. There are very few puzzles you could make that don't have an aesthetic, because the nature of their interaction requires a geometric dialogue between the parts. The idea that it forces you to engage with those qualities intellectually—that's what makes it so wonderful.

Jenny Wu: Puzzles are not just a formal problem. There are interesting ways of creating one element that fits perfectly together, then pulls apart to reveal connections and inner spaces that weren't visible before. A piece here might connect to something somewhere else. That has real spatial potential—and it can operate at many scales: a handrail detail, a building, a city.

How does that thinking translate into actual architecture?

DO: It can deal with program in interesting ways—not just placing two things side by side, but wrapping one around another, nesting things inside each other, working across multiple scales. A few years ago, we developed what we call "active inlays": objects embedded inside other puzzle objects. The more we made them, the more questions came up around perception. How do you read the depth of an object? Does it look like a surface, or can you sense what's behind it? Those questions had real parallels with architecture—facades, deep spaces, volumes within larger masses.

JW: I also teach this in my own studios, and students produce very different geometries and aesthetics. The point is not for them to do what I do—it's for them to find their own way in.

IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘TOMOROW’S STORIES ‘, ‘WHERE THE CITY CAN’T SEE ‘, ‘TOMOROW’S STORIES ‘, ‘WHERE THE CITY CAN’T SEE ‘ © LIAM YOUNG

How did each of you first end up in architecture?

JW: My parents were developers in Taiwan, so I grew up around real estate, construction, and selling. My dad did everything—from designing to selling the units. I was on construction sites all the time. I thought designing buildings sounded cool, but I didn't yet know what the creative side of it really meant.

When I went to Columbia for undergrad, I arrived during a really exciting moment. The graduate school was launching the Paperless Studios [an experimental studio by Bernard Tschumi that questioned how architects think through the tools they are using for representation], and I remember thinking: this is such an interesting field. Being asked to design things unlike anything I'd ever seen before was amazing. It wasn't just: design a house. Creativity was central from the start, and I hope I've held onto that.

DO: I also started early. I could draw from day one, and everyone around me assumed I'd become an artist. But that never quite felt right—it didn't feel tangible enough.

After high school, I went to community college and studied art while working in what was basically the family business. My father worked in a cast iron foundry, and my brothers and I all worked there for a time. I was doing midnight shifts making cast iron pieces while studying art during the day. Being exposed to both ends of creating—art on one side, manufacturing on the other—naturally led me toward architecture. It sat right between those worlds. When I finally got to school, I was delighted to find it wasn't what I'd expected. I'd imagined something traditional and noble, closer to being a lawyer than an artist. But it was creative and thrilling. If it had been what I thought, I wouldn't be here.

Who were the early voices that shaped how you think?

JW: I remember Karen Fairbanks [now chair of the Department of Architecture at Columbia University] and working for her and Scott Marble early on. Paul Lewis, now at Princeton, was also there; I think I was in his very first class. It was formative to know those people from when they were just starting out.

DO: In undergrad, Bob Condia and Vladimir Christic were both critical—very different from each other, but both brilliant. Later, in New York, I worked in radically different environments: a corporate office, with Toshiko Mori, and with Lebbeus Woods—sometimes simultaneously. Lebbeus was probably the most important voice in shaping who I am as an architect. With Toshiko, I mostly worked on small houses in Florida—learning how to make things, and how to make them well. Where we are now as an office is largely the result of those different ways of thinking converging.

And then you started the office together. What were those early years actually like?

JW: Instead of entering competitions, we started building our own installations—our apartment, then my parents' backyard deck. With each step, the work got published and we became a little more confident. We realized there was something interesting about the way we could design and build things that a contractor might not be able to. That started a decade of installation work that really built the office, our name, and the direction of the practice.

DO: The first thing we did was our own loft in LA. Very small. We set aside one month's rent for the renovation—$2,400. The only things we could really afford were two-by-fours and plywood. What we had was the drive to put thousands of hours of labor into working those materials: trimming pieces down, making elaborate, lightweight doors and cabinetry. Eventually it was published in Interior Design magazine. The editor liked the project but said the furniture was terrible, so she arranged for us to borrow pieces from a store. The published version was our tiny-budget renovation with very expensive borrowed furniture—but it worked. That led to more installations, which eventually led us toward metalwork.

From the beginning, we always said a strong architecture office should be working on something—not just responding to whatever project walks through the door. Our common obsession early on was the idea of line in space. Line led to surface, surface led to volume—that's roughly the first ten years.

One thing that's been important about the way we live is that we've never tried to separate the different parts of our lives. Work, making, children, home, office—we bundle them as tightly as possible. The influences bounce off one another. For us, that's been incredibly fulfilling.

IMAGES & VIDEO ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: ‘MACHINE LANSCAPES - EWASTE VILLAGE ‘, ‘PLANET CITY ‘, ‘GREAT ENDEAVOUR ‘, ‘MACHINE LANDSCAPES - GOOGLE DATA CENTRE ‘, ‘MACHINE LANDSCAPES - CHINA MICROWAVE FACTORY PRODUCTION LINE ‘, ‘MACHINE LANDSCAPES - FACEBOOK DATA CENTRE ‘, ‘GREAT ENDEAVOUR’ © LIAM YOUNG

How hands-on is the practice today compared to those early years?

DO: In the first ten years or so, we literally built almost everything ourselves. As projects got larger, that stopped making sense. We have a high-rise in Taipei—we obviously couldn't physically build that.

There's a real tension there. Installations consume every ounce of energy for six months, sometimes more. If you scale that up to a building, it reduces your ability to do many projects over a career. At a certain point, you have to trust that the larger work still carries the sensibility that came from the smaller things. The magical combination is doing big, culturally significant work while still making things in the back of the office that shape how you think.

How does technology fit into the way you work?

JW: We try not to limit ourselves to one way of working. We use new technologies when they're useful, but we also work with traditional methods. With LACE, my jewelry brand, 3D printing is the main production method. When I started, people were mostly using it for prototypes—not finished products. Each technology has its own logic: metal behaves differently from plastic or carbon fiber. You design for the technology you're working with, pushing its limits rather than forcing it to do something it can't. That's where our understanding of how things fit together and our curiosity about materials meet.

How do you jump between the different scales of your work—from a city to a body?

JW: I think of jewelry as architecture on the body. The body is a site. There are so many different ways of wearing something, and I love challenging the silhouette. With jewelry, you get a very immediate emotional connection with people—they put on a necklace and their eyes light up, they put on a ring and feel how it fits in their hand. Even if they don't know our architecture, they understand how something feels on them. That's very powerful.

The design process is similar across scales—it's the time frame that changes. With jewelry, from the first sketch to launch is maybe six months to a year. With a high-rise, construction alone can take several years. But the way of thinking is the same.

Does something change when an experiment becomes a building?

JW: When we were first designing the high-rises, we were drawing lines on the surface. We took one line and made it a big pipe on the building—and it looked ridiculous. At that scale, you can't rely on a single gesture. It has to be assembled through many more parts.

Seeing the first one finished was the most exhilarating feeling. The facade was incredibly complex, and the contractor had never built anything like it. The day they took the scaffolding down, people in Taiwan started texting me: we see it, it's so cool. Seeing it in real life was really rewarding.

IMAGES ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: GRAPHIC NOVEL PAGES ‘GREAT ENDEAVOUR ‘ (1,2) & ‘WORLD MACHINE ‘ (3,4) © LIAM YOUNG

What does the work look like day to day?

DO: The work is all over the place—in the best possible way. Furniture commissions, installations, a three-unit housing project, a pavilion on the LA River, a high-rise going up in Taipei. The emphasis isn't on a category. We try to do things that are design-oriented and meaningful to us and to our clients. What keeps it moving is experimentation. Without it, what are we doing—just looking at other architects and replicating what they're doing? But experimentation has to be understood broadly. It's not only mixing materials in a lab. It's also putting your work into the built environment and watching how people react, how they move, how they use things.

JW: LA has been essential to how the practice developed. Especially in the early years, the weather mattered—there were months, almost a full year, where there was barely any rain and we could work outside all day. The people around us matter too. Silver Lake has a creative community in film, TV, and many other fields. There are so many architecture schools in LA. Maybe we could find something similar somewhere else, but this is definitely home.

What are you each looking at outside of architecture?

DO: I have a handful of obsessions outside architecture, though most are closely related to it. I've made a lot of things for my kids—tricycles, a crib, a treehouse—and that work overlaps a lot with how I approach installations. I also spent several months obsessively building marble runs almost around the clock. I started teaching studios centered on them, because they put circulation front and center—not just the movement itself, but how spaces and forms begin to shape themselves around those paths. At some point I realized I'd never actually built one myself, despite teaching about them. So I had to step it up.

JW: For me, I took my interests and turned them into a business. Fashion and jewelry were things I was genuinely drawn to, and making things that go on people fulfills a different kind of creative energy. I care a lot about seams, craft, and reveals—those things exist in clothing, and from that angle they become very interesting for architecture. I taught studios inspired by how clothes drape, how something flat becomes three-dimensional, how a garment is seamed together.

Do you collect things?

JW: Wherever I go, I visit jewelry shops to see how people are thinking about it. When I'm in Asia, I look for interesting construction in Korean designers or local clothes. Those are the things I'm most drawn to, because they relate directly to what I do.

We have also been interested in curtain-like facades. For that, we looked at fashion, at how things drape, and at tectonics. I taught two studios at SCI-Arc inspired by that kind of tectonic thinking. In another studio, we looked at pattern-making: how clothes are seamed together, how something flat becomes three-dimensional.

I care a lot about seams, craft, and reveals. Those things exist in clothing, and from that angle it became very interesting for architecture.

DO: Not in the traditional sense. But if you see our office or our home, it's very much a collection of things we've made over the years. We don't have room for anything else. Every corner is filled with something that, at some point, was an absolute obsession. Those objects have meaning because of that.

Jenny, you've mentioned that Dwayne is never without a sketchbook. What does drawing mean for the practice?

JW: Ever since I've known Dwayne, he's carried one—it becomes an extension of his expression. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, he started doing these ink line drawings, and we thought: this is really something. They take a very keen sense of three-dimensionality. He doesn't use pencil underneath.

For every line that crosses something, he has to predict what's there—he can't just draw all the way across, he has to stop because something else might be there. There was a period when we were teaching on the East Coast and he could finish a drawing on a six-hour flight. He loves being productive all the time.

DO: The making side came from my father. He was the kind of Midwestern dad who could build or fix anything. Our house was maybe two rooms when I was born; by the time my parents had five kids, it had grown to eight or ten rooms, all added on over time. When I was six or seven, he bought a small scroll saw and told me: you can do whatever you want with this—just learn how to use it. Part of what he was teaching me was not to be afraid of tools, but to respect them. I ended up making wooden relief carvings of his Harley Davidsons—layered cutouts assembled into two-and-a-half-dimensional sculptures. My parents still have them. When I look back now, I can see it all there: drawing, making, machines, obsession.

After nearly twenty years, what still drives this?

JW: Curiosity. I feel like that's fundamental to being an architect. We're always looking at something and wondering: how did they do that? How is this made? How do you make the perfect corner? Our eyes are always roaming—from objects to buildings. Being curious is what keeps it going.

DO: I'm a huge fan of Tom Waits. What interests me about him is that he's never fit into a clear category—somewhere between jazz crooner, blues musician, and experimental artist. What I admire most is that he's maintained his own course across the full span of his career. Artists like that often influence the broader culture more than the commercially successful ones. The mainstream notices the big stars, but many of those artists are actually paying close attention to people like Tom Waits—people working at the edges, developing a language entirely their own. Those are the kinds of architects I admire too.

Most architects I admire dedicated themselves to the work they truly wanted to do for a very long time—often without what most people would call success. Instead of a five-year plan, they had a thirty-year plan. That's closer to how we operate. It's risky. But I hope they all had a fulfilling life as architects. I hope we do too.