The Architecture and Design Film Festival
“Architecture is storytelling,” Balkrishna Doshi said in the opening of The Promise (2023), a documentary about the influential architect’s life. “It’s a journey. It’s a dialogue. It’s a discovery of who you really are.” In 2018, Doshi became the first Indian architect to receive the Pritzker Prize, considered the highest honor in the profession. Doshi was active for seventy years in his home country; he passed away last year at the age of ninety-five. The Promise was just one of the films featured in the 2023 edition of the Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF), an annual event that has showcased films about the human stories behind architecture for the past fifteen years.
Festival founder Kyle Bergman had always been interested in film before pursuing a career as an architect. By the year 2000, he toyed with starting an architecture-themed festival. But it wasn’t until he saw Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary My Architect (2003)—the filmmaker’s personal story of growing up in the shadow of his father, the inscrutable, much-lauded modern architect Louis Kahn (1901–74). The film followed Nathaniel as he unpacked his father’s mysterious death in a Penn Station bathroom—as well as the revelation that his father left behind three different families, none of which were aware of the other.1
“As architects we loved it, because it was a film that talked about [Louis] Kahn, but the general public loved it because it was a son’s search for his father—you don’t have to be an architect or designer to like it,” Bergman said. “The opportunity for the festival was to showcase films that have both a design story and a human story.”
The festival officially launched in 2009 in the small town of Waitsfield, Vermont, and today has expanded to cities across North America—often including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto—as well as an online version. “My whole interest was bringing audiences together that were both professional and nonprofessional,” Bergman added. “As architects and designers, we have great conversations among ourselves, but what we’re not so great [at] is expanding that to a larger audience.”