“We make alternative worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways, and that's one of the powers of a show like The Last of Us. It forces us to confront what some of these futures might look like, and act as cautionary tales—hopefully to engender new kinds of action in the present that might… help us to understand how we might avoid such a future”—Liam Young

Architect and film director Liam Young joined acclaimed production designer Join Paino and curator Lucia Pietroiusti for an In Conversation talk during our Summit 2023, focused around HBO’s hit TV show The Last of Us, for which Paino helmed the production.

Based on a video game of the same name, The Last of Us follows the story of survivors of global pandemic caused by a mutated fungus that infects human hosts and controls their bodies. This causes a mass societal collapse, which Paino had to depict by envisioning entire cities that have experienced decades of urban decay.

“To give the world its logic and gravitas: a disaster happened 20 years ago and nature has taken over. There are no resources or electricity or anything like that to reuse, rebuild, and remake everything… that was our foundational logic; that was our brief so to speak,” said Paino.

The engaging conversation led to a discussion around why it’s important for us to design fictional and dystopian worlds, in order to understand how disasters occur, and importantly, how to avoid them happening in the first place. Here, the role of architects and designers in examining and improving our delicate systems and fragile infrastructures is key. This is also true of Young’s project The Great Endeavor, a film that imagines the colossal infrastructure required to remove CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere, which debuted as part of an exhibition at the Arsenale for the recently opened Venice Architecture Biennale.