The Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery presents Liam Young: New Romance, the first US solo exhibition of Australian-born architect Liam Young—one of the most distinctive and adventurous voices in contemporary architecture today. At the core of his multidisciplinary practice is a continuous interrogation of the present realities of cities. Through research expeditions, storytelling, documentary film, and performance, Young extrapolates and exaggerates existing networks, systems, and technologies to imagine possible future urbanisms. The exhibition presents three short films—In the Robot Skies (2016), Where the City Can’t See (2016), and the debut of Renderlands (2017)—and charts his recent work in fiction film and his experimentation with new cinematic tools. Each framed as a love story, the films reveal Young’s emerging interest in world building: the design of a cinematic universe in which narratives evolve.

Renderlands is a mixed reality romantic fantasy that chronicles a digital renderer’s virtual construction of a dream city. Set in an outsourced video game company in India, the film uses scavenged VFX movie models and 3D game assets—remnants of cancelled production jobs on studio hard drives—to present a contemporary utopia in the thickness of the screen: a virtual city of demolished landmarks, drowned streetscapes, alien invasions, and synthetic actors.

In the Robot Skies tells the story of two teenagers who communicate through a hacked drone from within the digital confines of a high-rise council estate in London. Filmed by drones programmed with specific cinematic rules and behaviors, the film embraces the drone as an instrument of visual storytelling, and as the catalyst for a network of surveillance activists and hackers. 

Where the City Can’t See follows a group of young factory workers as they drift through a smart city in a driverless taxi. Shot entirely with laser scanning technology, the film explores emergent subcultures in a city ruled by urban management systems and CCTV surveillance. 

Young harnesses the popular medium of fiction film and cutting-edge visualization technologies to open up critical conversations on the role of current digital infrastructures in shaping future cities. Based on intensive research and innovative production methods, his cinematic worlds and speculative scenarios present creative advances in architectural representation and design. As documentation of Young’s process, the exhibition features a selection of specialized props, materials, and research that helped build each world.