As a trained architect who identifies as a speculative architect, how do you differentiate between these approaches to architecture?

I work as an architect, but I don't make buildings as physical objects. I tell stories about the global, urban, and architectural implications of new technologies and ecologies to inspire the design of our future. At its core, architecture is the art and craft of telling stories with and through space. This makes the architect as a storyteller extremely valuable, particularly at this moment when the forces that once defined cities—that were the remit of architects—have increasingly migrated into phenomena, such as technologies and ecologies, that architects don't have control over.

Is that why you discuss worldbuilding in the architectural context as applying architectural thinking to strategy, politics, planning, writing, and activism? Is the bridge between architecture and worldbuilding paved by translating architectural skills into cultural agency?

Architects have traditionally worked at the site plan scale. Anything beyond the edges of the site plan often goes unconsidered, implying that a boundary can be erected around the design. A building is more than a physical collection of materials; it is a cloud coalesced out of a planetary network of flows and forces, material supply chains, cultures, and systems.

You can no longer view a building as a standalone object. Its relationship to the ground from which its materials originated needs to be considered and understood within the context of the labor ecologies involved in its production, the financial ecologies that enabled its creation, and the entire ecosystem encompassing culture, environment, materials, economics, politics, energies and objects within that space. Whether it's a building or a device, nothing exists outside the intricate and interconnected web that spans the entire planet. Worldbuilding is an effort to discard traditional site plans and imagine a new scale of thinking—one that is planetary and, as such, redefines and expands what a site means to an architect.

At the same time, what shapes us and defines our urban experiences increasingly exists beyond the built spectrum. These are mobile technologies, access to the network, our digital and online selves, and the various platforms we drift across. These are physical spaces and the digital shadows that exist within them and around them, systems that traditional architects very rarely intervene in. The worldbuilder, or speculative architect, is someone who interplays with these environments and creates culture around them through stories, films, and the imagining of world-making to anticipate what these new infrastructures might mean for us and how they might change our lives and spaces.

How can architects integrate speculations into their practice to make architecture a more holistic tool for building and serving the future?

At their core, architects have always been speculators. Even in the design of the simplest house, we’re role-playing and imagining what it might be like to live within it. We tell a story about what it means to wake up, make breakfast, get dressed, and go to work. This kind of storytelling is similar to what a screenwriter does when envisioning a film scene, but it’s also what an architect does when imagining the flow between different spaces. Architects engage in this speculative process not only in design but also in competition entries and pitches to clients.

The traditional art of architecture has been about sheltering humans. The primitive hut, an iconic primordial seed of the discipline's origins, was designed to protect us from the unpredictable forces of nature. However, human-centered design has led to the climate crisis we now face. We've shaped the world according to our own needs and desires, often at the expense of the broader ecosystem.

The architects of today can and should acknowledge and embrace the multi-species collaboration inherent in any ecosystem. We should be just as concerned with whooping crane-centered design, wetlands-centered design, atmosphere-centered design, or even hard-drive-centered design. On a site plan, we should consider the local bird species, asking what their needs, aspirations, and desires are and how to fulfill them just as we do for the human client. Architects occupy a unique space between culture and technology, which allows us to speculate and imagine. These speculations should not be deemed valid only when they result in built form.

Do speculations differ from utopian or science fiction fantasies?

The goal of speculative architecture is to prototype ideas and affect change through achievable visions. It’s not escapist, it uses narratives that are close enough to our own experience to allow us to project ourselves into them. Our relationship to the future has always been shaped by popular culture. Therefore, the more stories we tell, the more vessels we create for critical ideas to illuminate new spaces. This is why I’m based in Los Angeles and work in the machine of Hollywood. The futures we imagine are the futures we will one day inhabit.

How does creating empathy through stories—what you’ve called "dramatizing data"—engage audiences with concepts like climate issues, technological acceleration, and other global concerns that we might fear, not understand, or simply not care about? How does it make these issues approachable, attractive, and, therefore, actionable?

Many extraordinary people have devoted their lives to the vision of a hopeful world based on traditional models of ecological activism. It's deeply painful that these ideas have often failed. We are now in a moment where we must act on the ecological emergency, but we lack images that are fit for purpose—images to rally around and fight for. The visions of the future that I present are provocative, not because they are controversial, but because they challenge the types of images we’ve been conditioned to accept. Architects have the power to create new images that are truly fit for purpose, conveying and encouraging a different kind of future.

My films are highly aestheticized; I discuss carbon capture removal structures with the same reverence that we once reserved for wandering clouds and daffodils. I describe the movement of shipping containers across the tarmac of the world’s largest ports as David Attenborough might describe gazelles prancing across the savannah. I co-opt the language of the sublime—in both imagery and narration—to connect people to possible futures, bringing what exists on the margins of our consciousness and in the peripheries of our cities into the popular imagination.

New, engaging narratives do incite change by inspiring collective action at the scale required for addressing the global climate crisis. Hashtag activism, for example, has facilitated the largest gatherings of people in human history through the mobilization of networks for common causes worldwide. This demonstrates the network's potential to enable agency at an unprecedented scale and offer a form of governance that works in this context. Technology itself is inherently neutral; it's our values that we project onto it. This is why creating new language around ethics and values is so crucial right now.

You have said that we are in a moment of ‘before culture technologies,’ where accelerated technology has arrived faster than our capacity to culturally and socially understand it. What role do you see AI and big data algorithms playing in governance and future cities?

Planet City [my speculative architectural city of the future, which sees all several billion human inhabitants of Earth living together in a single city while wilderness overtakes the rest of the planet] imagines an entirely different model of nation-state, identity, citizenship, and governance than our current ones. We used algorithms to create Planet City. Algorithms imagined the form of the city emerging through various criteria, such as access to light at the bottom levels of the city, distributions of resources, data centers, and other forms of infrastructures. The city was engineered on those forms of scientific big data governance.

AI governance is the future. I have much more faith in an algorithm that is ethically designed than I do in a politician who is operating in their own self-interest. The problem we need to solve for AI governance is democratization. Algorithms are currently proprietarily owned and evolve essentially through five companies. We need to be thinking about forms of public code where we see AI in the same way we see access to clean water or the energy grid. AI needs to be understood as a public utility.