The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) — the world’s largest film festival devoted to architecture and design — returns to New York, marking the 18th year of the festival. For the first time in its history, the 2026 program for ADFF:NY, presented by Eventscape, will open at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) before the festival settles in for its run at the Village East by Angelika.
The festival will open with the world premiere of MUNDO FRÁGIL at MoMA. Filmed two years before he became the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, it captures an intimate, unguarded portrait of Smiljan Radić before his recent rise to global status. After the opening night screening, the architect and filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine will speak to the film in a conversation moderated by Martino Stierli, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA.
The festival will then move 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 neighbourhoods 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.
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.
