The Architecture & Design Film Festival To Present Its Largest-Ever Global Lineup

The world’s most comprehensive film festival dedicated to architecture and design, the aptly titled Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF), will commence its 2026–2027 season on October 12. The opening night selection—the world premiere of MUNDO FRÁGIL, a portrait of 2026 Pritzker laureate Smiljan Radić directed by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine—will screen at The Museum of Modern Art. The ensuing slate, including the world premiere of Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano), directed by Jonathan Goodman Levitt, will be shown at Village East by Angelika. ADFF will then travel the world, from Toronto to Vancouver, Mumbai, Detroit, and Chicago.

“You can draw a line through almost every film in this year’s festival: what do we do with what’s already been built,” Kyle Bergman, Founder and Festival Director of the Architecture & Design Film Festival, says. “Movements like the Bauhaus and Googie are being handed back to the people who lived them, and to the people that history left out of the credits. And more than one of these films is watching a housing experiment play out in real time, with no guarantee it works.”

Other timely themes include adaptive reuse as a method of environmentalism, as seen in the U.S. premiere of Barbara Buser – Swiss Pioneer of Sustainability, directed by Gabriele Schärer. “This festival is about surfacing the questions facing architects and designers right now,” Bergman adds, “and these films give us the chance to explore, discuss, and consider them—an active engagement with the past, present, and future that offers unique insight into how the field is evolving.”

As in previous years, this 18th edition will incorporate programming, talks, and special guests. The breadth and depth of the lineup, however, remains the highlight. This includes Máximapark, which documents a Dutch market-garden district’s community-driven transformation; The Tower That Built A City, a study of Toronto’s CN Tower and its relationship to its surroundings; and COPAN, which sets a contested election for building administrator inside Oscar Niemeyer’s 5,000-resident São Paulo housing block alongside Brazil’s national election. Each work intends to engage, inform, and inspire.