LIAM YOUNG

In 2026, the Barbican Centre announced the presentation of Young’s In Other Worlds, a large-scale immersive exhibition that transforms the London institution into a sequence of speculative environments exploring climate futures and planetary systems.

Early life and Career

Liam Young was born in Australia in 1979 and trained as an architect before shifting his focus from conventional building practice to film and speculative urbanism. He is the founder of the urban futures think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and co-runs Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels to remote sites to document supply chains, landscapes of extraction, and ‘weak signals’ of possible futures. Alongside his studio work, Young has held teaching roles at institutions such as the Architectural Association in London, Princeton University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he runs the MA in Fiction and Entertainment.

Young’s move from office-based architecture to moving-image and immersive installations coincided with a growing interest in how visual effects, gaming engines, and cinematic tools could be used as design media for future cities. Working with large interdisciplinary teams, he began to develop narrative films and exhibitions that present speculative worlds as if they were documentary footage, blurring the lines between critical design, science fiction, and environmental storytelling.

Works, Series and Methods

A key project in Young’s practice is Planet City (2016–2023), an animated film and ongoing research project that imagines the entire human population living in a single hyper-dense city, freeing the rest of the Earth for rewilding and ecological repair. Presented in exhibitions such as Liam Young: Planetary Redesign at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Planet City uses sweeping digital vistas, costume design, and choreographed ritual to visualise a radical reorganisation of planetary life as a response to the climate crisis. The work has been widely discussed as an example of how speculative architecture can propose extreme-yet-thoughtful scenarios that are not predictions but provocations for public debate.

Another major body of work, The Great Endeavor (2023), first shown at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and then in Melbourne, depicts the construction of a vast global system of renewable energy and carbon capture infrastructures. The project visualises fleets of workers, machines, and ocean-scale platforms engaged in removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, presenting climate mitigation as a coordinated planetary project rather than an abstract policy goal. Young’s films typically mix real scientific research with speculative engineering and cinematic storytelling, encouraging viewers to consider both the promise and politics of large-scale technological interventions.

In many exhibitions, including Planetary Redesign, Young combines multi-channel film installations with photography, physical models, and costumes made in collaboration with designers such as Ane Crabtree (costume designer for The Handmaid’s Tale), extending his worlds beyond the screen into the gallery space. These environments are often accompanied by layered soundscapes and voice-over narration that frame each project as a form of documentary from a near-future timeline, further blurring fiction and reportage. Across these works, his method centres on collaborative world-building: assembling teams of scientists, VFX artists, writers, and performers to co-produce complex visual narratives.

Themes and Context

Young’s work consistently explores the entanglement of climate change, planetary-scale infrastructures, and the everyday experience of urban life. Rather than depicting dystopian collapse, he often presents ‘radically optimistic’ scenarios that foreground collective action and systemic redesign, while still acknowledging the social, cultural, and political obstacles involved. His films and installations operate within conversations around speculative design, post-internet art, and critical futures studies, using visual spectacle not as an escape but as a tool for public imagination.

Central to these projects is the idea that the future is not a distant, fixed endpoint but something we actively construct through stories, images, and infrastructures. For Young, imaginary worlds are training grounds for new relationships between humans and machines, between cities and nonhuman ecologies, and between extraction-driven economies and possible forms of ecological balance. By showing planetary systems at cinematic scale—whether carbon capture arrays or megastructural cities—he invites viewers to consider themselves as both beneficiaries and agents of these systems.

Exhibitions and Recognition

In Other Worlds, presented as the Barbican’s headline 2026 immersive exhibition, is billed as Young’s first major UK solo exhibition experience and a highlight of the Barbican Immersive programme. Running from 21 May to 6 September 2026, it occupies multiple sites within the Barbican Centre, including the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve, and Car Park 5, and features new and past films, large-scale projections, models, tapestries, and sound works developed with an international group of collaborators. The exhibition is framed as a cinematic journey through speculative futures shaped by climate science and emerging technologies, reinforcing Young’s reputation as a leading figure in immersive, research-driven world-building.

Prior to the Barbican, Liam Young: Planetary Redesign at NGV Australia marked his first major solo exhibition in his home country, bringing together works including Planet City and The Great Endeavor in an immersive environment. His projects have also been included in the Venice Architecture Biennale and collected or presented by major institutions such as MoMA, the Met, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, while he continues to lecture and teach internationally on speculative architecture and design futures.

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Ocula | 2026