Architecture & Design Film Festival Opens Its 2026/2027 Season in New York City at MoMA With Groundbreaking Films About Design Legacy, Reinvention, and What Comes Next
The 2026 slate of films explore the reuse of old buildings, the important figures written out of legacy movements, and social housing as an active experiment across eras—with two world premieres, including MUNDO FRÁGIL, a portrait of 2026 Pritzker laureate Smiljan Radić and Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano), a study of the life within five RPBW buildings across four continents
2026/2027 Season Expands to Detroit as ADFF Marks 18 Years With Its Largest-Ever Global Lineup
NEW YORK (August 17, 2026) — The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) — the world's largest film festival devoted to architecture and design — returns to New York, opening its 2026/2027 season from October 12–17, 2026, marking the 18th year of the festival. For the first time in its history, the program for ADFF:NY, presented by Eventscape, opens at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) before the festival settles in for its run at the Village East by Angelika. The 2026/2027 season also marks ADFF's expansion, with the festival launching an inaugural edition in Detroit, Michigan, alongside returning stops in Toronto, Vancouver, Mumbai, 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,” said Kyle Bergman, Founder and Festival Director of the Architecture & Design Film Festival. “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. This festival is about surfacing the questions facing architects and designers right now, 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.”
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The festival will open with the world premiere of MUNDO FRÁGIL at MoMA. Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine spent a week with Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, traveling across his country to explore what he thinks is important. Filmed six months before he became the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, it captures an intimate, unguarded portrait of the architect before his recent rise to global status. After the opening night screening, Smiljan Radić and filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine will be in conversation, moderated by Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA.
Following opening night at MoMA, the festival moves to the iconic Village East by Angelika for its remaining five days — including another world premiere, Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano), which follows the doctors, interns, security guards, and retirees who inhabit five Renzo Piano Building Workshop landmarks across four continents. Across the full ADFF:NY lineup, the films explore urgent, nuanced issues facing the field today, including:
- Housing as an Experiment Still Running: Several of this year's films follow buildings not as finished objects but as ongoing social bets. In COPAN, a contested election for building administrator inside Oscar Niemeyer's 5,000-resident São Paulo housing block plays out alongside Brazil's national election — democracy rehearsed one floor at a time. The Tingbjerg Experiment follows a Copenhagen developer's plan to move Danish families into one of the city's most stigmatized, largely immigrant housing districts, and captures a social experiment that doesn't resolve as neatly as intended. The World in a Square spends a summer inside Superkilen, the Copenhagen park built to hold one of the city's most diverse neighborhoods together. And Máximapark tracks a Dutch market-garden district's community-driven transformation into public gardens and shared land.
- Adaptive Reuse as a Method of Environmentalism: In Barbara Buser – Swiss Pioneer of Sustainability, the Basel-based architect never once uses the phrase “adaptive reuse” — she just does it, pulling former industrial buildings back from demolition and rebuilding them from what's already there. That's less a trend than a default across the field at this point, and the festival's line-up treats it that way: reuse as the plainest form of environmental architecture there is.
- Old Movements Revisited for Overlooked Figures: bauhaus forever. revisits Walter Gropius's postwar Berlin through the Bauhaus-Archiv itself — a building that's currently both an archive and a construction site, which turns out to be exactly the right metaphor for a movement born out of instability and still being renovated, literally and otherwise. Googie does the same for the neon, space-age coffee shops and car washes of 1950s and '60s Los Angeles, arguing a much-mocked style deserves a serious second look. And Out of the Picture goes after the erasure directly: it opens with the 1991 Pritzker Prize, awarded to Robert Venturi alone despite Denise Scott Brown's equal partnership in their firm — and builds from there into a wider reckoning with the women architects, including Eileen Gray, written out of the field's official record.
Additional programming, talks, and special guests will be announced as the festival approaches. The full ADFF:NY schedule will be available at adfilmfest.com beginning September 1st, when tickets go on sale.
SELECTED FILMS
World Premiere
- MUNDO FRÁGIL — Dir. Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine. Opening Night selection. (Italy/France, 90 min)
- Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano) Dir. filmmaker Jonathan Goodman Levitt. (USA, 90 min)
U.S. Premieres
- Barbara Buser – Swiss Pioneer of Sustainability — Dir. Gabriele Schärer. (Switzerland, 118 min)
- bauhaus forever. — Dir. Nico Weber. (Germany/Netherlands, 96 min)
- COPAN — Dir. Carine Wallauer. (Brazil, 97 min)
- Máximapark – From Greenhouses to a Living Landscape — Dir. Hans den Hartog. (Netherlands, 83 min)
- Out of the Picture — Dir. An. Ash Smolar. (Belgium, 88 min)
- The Tingbjerg Experiment — Dir. Louise Detlefsen. (Denmark, 86 min)
- The Tower That Built A City — Dir. Mark Myers. (Canada, 106 min)
- The World in a Square — Dir. Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine. (Denmark, 72 min)
New York Premiere
- Googie — Dir. Jake Gorst. (USA, 58 min)
2026/2027 SEASON
Following ADFF:NY, the first event of the season, ADFF will travel to cities around the world, including:
- ADFF:NY - Oct 12–17, 2026
- ADFF:TORONTO - Nov 4–7, 2026
- ADFF:VANCOUVER - Nov 10–15, 2026
- ADFF: MUMBAI - Jan 13–17, 2027
- ADFF:DETROIT - Feb 4–6, 2027
- ADFF:CHICAGO - Feb 18–21, 2027
Media Assets
Images, film descriptions, and trailers are available here. Request screener access and festival press passes by emailing sara@griffinprny.com.
About the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF)
Founded in 2009, the Architecture & Design Film Festival celebrates the creative spirit that drives architecture and design. Through a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, ADFF creates an opportunity to educate, entertain, engage, and inspire audiences of all backgrounds. Since its inception, ADFF has grown into the world's largest film festival devoted to the subject, with an annual festival kicking off in New York each year before traveling for a range of iterations and special screenings around the world. For more information, visit adfilmfest.com or @adfilmfest on Instagram and Facebook.
Media Contact
Sara Griffin
sara@griffinprny.com
+1-917-656-6348