Michael Young

Enstrangement

The century-old idea of “defamiliarization”—first developed by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device”—has become a touchstone for contemporary conversations on realism in aesthetics, popping up in discussions of neural networks, philosophies of the strange and uncanny, Sianne Ngai’s arguments around “the interesting,” and discourse on the films of Chantal Akerman. The use of the term though has one often overlooked nuance. The English translation of ostranenie required the creation of a neologism, enstrangement, a combination of enchantment and estrangement.
This lecture will address the possibilities of “enstrangement” in art and architecture including the work of Young & Ayata.

Bio

Michael Young is an architect and educator practicing in New York City where he is a founding partner of the architectural design studio Young & Ayata. Young & Ayata have received the Progressive Architecture award, the Design Vanguard Award, the Young Architects Prize, and a first-place prize for the design of the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art-New York, the Istanbul Modern, the Graham Foundation, SCI-Arc and Princeton University. Michael has published numerous essays and the books The Estranged Object (Graham Foundation, 2015) and Reality Modeled After Images (Routledge, 2021). He was the 2019-20 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Michael earned his MArch II degree from Princeton University and his BArch from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is a registered architect in the State of New York.