Starchitects, Sustainability, and Virtual Reality at the Architecture and Design Film Festival

The ninth edition of New York’s Architecture and Design Film Festival balances movies about boldface names with documentaries about historic preservation of the future of urbanism.

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Still from Made in Ilima (2017), directed by Thatcher Bean (courtesy Thatcher Bean)

It has been said that writing about music is as utterly nonsensical as dancing about architecture. Making films about architecture is a different matter entirely. For proof, consider the Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF), the ninth New York edition of which kicks off on November 1. Over its five-day run it will feature screenings of 34 films — including four world premieres — a short virtual reality documentary about the enduring influence of Buckminster Fuller, and plenty of post-screening panels and conversations.

And while the New York ADFF’s lineup features plenty of films about the usual starchitects — from the Rem Koolhaas doc REM and the Australian short Getting Frank Gehry to the elegiac Zaha: An Architectural Legacy and the prismatic Jean Nouvel: Reflections — it will also take up more unexpected and urgent topics. For the preservation-inclined, a new documentary by Ina Weisse tracks the project to renovate Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, while SUPERDESIGN tells the story of Italy’s radical design period in the 1960s and ’70s. Oscar Boyson’s crowd-sourced short documentary, The Future of Cities, features citizens from some 75 countries showcasing elements of their local urban design that work for them. Finally, Made in Ilima tracks the collective building process of a school and community center by the MASS Design Group in Ilima, a town in a remote and ecologically sensitive region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.