Of Affect: 2025 Architecture & Film Symposium with Liam Young

4:15pm – Liam Young keynote lecture
5:15pm – Film screenings (The Great Endeavour, After the End, Planet City)
6:00pm – Roundtable discussion with Liam Young

The Architecture & Film Symposium is a biennial event that engages the liminal condition between the built environment and the filmic space. It investigates the architectural quality of films and the cinematic structure of spatial experience. Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops to moving images, film discourses have actively shaped and critiqued the built environment. And while architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film, their latent influences inform cinematic processes of thinking and making.

The symposium adopts cinematic representations of the built environment as a cultural lens for interdisciplinary theoretical debate. It exploits the filmic capacity to produce virtual spatial experiences as design experimentation.

Every two years, scholars from architecture, interior design, urban design, landscape architecture, film studies, animation, production design, cultural studies, set design, etc. come together to discuss the year’s theme.

Symposium Chairs:
Jon Yoder, PhD, Kent State University
Vahid Vahdat, PhD, Washington State University

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Liam Young is a designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today.

As a worldbuilder he visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for the film, television and game industry including working out of the writers room on the series adaptation of GATTACA for Sony/Showtime and as visual consultant on the Golden Globe and BAFTA nominated feature Swan Song, starring Mahershala Ali and Awkwafina for Apple.

His own films have premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, Tribeca, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, Venice Biennale, the BBC and the Guardian including co producing the documentary Consumed which was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2017 BAFTA’s and designing and directing the sci fi film Planet City that premiered at Tribeca in 2022 and is the subject of Young’s TED talk now watched by almost 3million viewers. His films, designs and costumes have been collected internationally by museums such as the MoMA in New York, the Smithsonian, SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Rome’s MAXXI Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, M Plus Hong Kong, Powerhouse Museum Sydney and many more.

In parallel to his work in entertainment he is in demand as one of the worlds foremost futurists consulting on next generation technologies and designs for clients such as Nike, BMW, Google, Sony, Mitsubishi, Showtime, Microsoft, Ford, NASA JPL, L’Oreal, the Dubai Government, DHL and numerous others. Young’s worldbuilding is also informed by his academic research and has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angeles. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth.