Architecture’s Biggest Question Isn’t What to Build Next. It’s What to Do With What We Already Have.
For a film festival ostensibly about architecture and design, this year’s Architecture & Design Film Festival is surprisingly preoccupied with what already exists.
Old buildings. Aging housing projects. Discredited architectural styles. Public spaces whose success can only be measured years after the ribbon cutting. Modernist movements whose official histories are being rewritten. And, perhaps most provocatively, architects whose contributions were obscured or erased while their male collaborators became canonical figures.
That tension between architecture’s impulse to make something new and the increasingly urgent need to reconsider what it has inherited runs through ADFF, which returns October 12–17 to open the Architecture & Design Film Festival’s 2026/2027 season. Now in its 18th year, ADFF is expanding geographically while also widening its lens on what constitutes an architectural story.
For the first time, the New York festival will open at the Museum of Modern Art before moving to its longtime home at Village East by Angelika for five additional days of screenings. The season then travels to Toronto, Vancouver, Mumbai, the festival’s inaugural Detroit edition, and Chicago.