Design for a Planetary Age

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Liu Yiqiu :

Date: 17 Oct 2025
Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT426

Design for a Planetary Age

Abstract:
The architectural site is a convenient fiction — a neatly drawn boundary that that lets us imagine our work as a contained act of creation. This fiction makes it easy to overlook where our materials are violently extracted and where our construction waste will inevitably settle. It allows a clean urban centre to accumulate capital while externalizing its immense ecological and social debt onto a vast, overlooked periphery. Today, that periphery pushes back: clear-cut forests, excavated mountains, and exploited communities return as heat, floods, fires, and supply-chain breakdowns.

What is the designer’s role when the site is no longer an island, but an open inquiry in a planetary system? In the Anthropocene, our practice must expand beyond the property line to trace the entangled geographies of extraction, labour, and energy behind buildings. We have the ethical imperative to interrogate not just how to design, but why, for whom, and with what consequences across scales.

This talk proposes a shift from site-bounded, form-driven work toward reciprocal, non-extractive practice. Spanning across my research, teaching, and architectural work, this talk will present tangible methods to trace what lies behind, beneath, and beyond the conventional site, and how to intervene with critical care. Ultimately, it is a call for design that dares to see further and care deeper: design for the complex, fragile, and interconnected planet we all belong.

Dr. Yiqiu Liu is an architect and urban researcher. She received her doctorate at ETH Zurich with a medal nomination and holds a BA and MA in Architecture from Southeast University, Nanjing. She is currently a research and teaching associate at TU Munich and co-coordinates the Swiss Network for International Studies project The Production of Cloud at ETH Zurich, developing frameworks on the theorisation, design, and governance of AI infrastructures across Switzerland, the United States, and China.

Dr. Liu’s research decentres and ecologies architecture and urbanism—shifting focus from static buildings to extended, relational, more-than-human urbanization systems with metabolic interdependencies and socio-political complexity. Her work traces peripheral urbanization processes beyond the city and develops vocabularies and methods that transcend Western-centric models. In practice, she has led several award-winning projects with Christian Kerez and is the recipient of the 2024 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation of Distinction. She frequently consults for public and private stakeholders on spatial development, fostering critical dialogue and collaboration between Asia and Europe.