Finding the Intersection of Architecture, Design, and Film

The Architecture & Design Film Fest (ADFF), held every year in multiple cities across the US and Canada, is celebrating its 15th year showcasing some of the best, most influential films in architecture and design. In celebration of this achievement, we recently sat down with Festival Director Kyle Bergman to learn a little bit more about how and where film, architecture, and design intersect.

This year’s ADFF kicks off October 12 in New York. Those interested can purchase tickets here.

Custom Builder (CB): Before we get into any specifics, why don’t you tell us about the ADFF. How did it start and how has it evolved over the last 15 years?

Kyle Bergman (KB) (pictured right) : So, I'm an architect, and I started thinking about it, probably around 2000. The idea was kind of gnawing at me. My thinking was, ‘this would be fun. But I’ve never done a film festival and don’t really know anything about it.’ So I start really thinking about it, wondering if there’d even be enough films to put on a festival specific to architecture and design. But in 2003 the film My Architectby Nathaniel Kahn came out. The film was about Nathaniel’s father, the famous architect Louis Kahn, and ended up received an Oscar nomination. As architects, we love the film because it’s about a famous architect. But the general public loved it because it was a great story about a kid searching for his father—turns out his father had three families with three different women all within a couple miles of each other, and none of them knew each other; it was very interesting.

That film really got me thinking about the festival seriously, and about five years later I came to a point where I knew I either had to fucking do this thing or just let it go completely. I bring up Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect not only because it helped me understand how film and architecture can be effectively blended, but also because it’s the film’s 20th anniversary and we’ll be screening it at this year’s festival. Nathaniel himself will be in attendance.

So, we wanted the first festival to be in New York, but we ultimately ended up putting it on in a small town in Vermont. We ended up attracting about 1,000 people. We learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes. For the next year we moved the festival to New York, where we ran it for a few years before realizing that the amount of time we were putting in organizing and curating programming for just one festival didn’t make sense. And while I thought everyone across the country would be find coming to New York for the festival, it turns out audiences for these things are fairly regional. We eventually made the decision to expand the number of cities we were showing at. This year we’re in four cities—New York (Oct 12-14), Toronto (Nov 1-4), Vancouver (Nov 9-12), and Chicago (Jan 31-Feb 4, 2024). We’re hoping to add Mumbai, India next.

CB: And how many films do you showcase?

KB: We preview about 250 films a year and select 15-20 to screen. This year we have 19 films.

I think architecture issues and building issues are the same as all the issues in the world. What’s different is the way we deal with them. We deal with them as builders and makers and architects, and that manifests in different ways.

CB: Architecture and design is obviously central to all of the films that you show. But when you think about your ideal audience, is it all residential construction professionals or are you hoping to bring in the general public, as well?

KB: Our goal, and we've really been good at this, is to consistently get a 50/50 split of the general public and design professionals—which is everyone, from construction managers, to builders, to architects and designers, lighting designers, etc. In our industry, there's a lot of people who are really juiced up and love what they do. They're not burnt out with architecture and design and construction at the end of the day; they're energized by it and like to engage with it. And those are the people who come to the festival. So we get this really good, creative, audience of design professionals and the vibe is  really positive and upbeat and dynamic.

And then we get a lot of people who just love architecture and design and building.

CB: You mentioned you preview hundreds of films. Obviously, you can only choose so many. When it comes to selecting those few films that you do, what is it exactly that you're looking for?

KB: First and foremost, it needs to reach a certain bar for the design professional. The perfect film is sophisticated enough from a design perspective to be interesting. But it also needs a human story to make it overall interesting. That's the sweet spot. Not every film hits that sweet spot—which is just the nature of film—but that is the goal.

CB: And who ultimately makes those selections?

KB: Our programming team is made up of both design and film professionals.

TerraForma tells the story of Ascension Island, which, through 'terraforming,' was transformed from a desert island into a "tropical paradise." The film challenges the very definition of "nature."

CB: Are you looking for film makers to address modern architectural issues? A film you’re showing this year, TerraForma, for instance talks about geoengineering an island from a desert to a forest. Is a response to something like climate change a topic of interest for the festival?

KB: Yeah. What's interesting about that film is it’s paired with another film called House of Adaptation. We pair those films for their shared theme, which is, ‘we have designed our way into the climate problem.’ TerraForma basically shows this island for which humans changed the climate. The British started planting trees there, because there was no moisture, and, slowly, the whole climate of the island changed. So we've designed our way into a problem. Even though it was maybe looked at as a benefit for that island because it had more rain and more water. But certainly there were winners and losers. When the climate changed, certain animals, like some snakes and lizards for instance, were wiped out.

And then the second film, House of Adaptation, is the second part of that climate equation,  ‘we’re going to design our way out of it.’ It’s about the design and construction of a floating building in Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands. And it's very construction oriented. It talks about how to make a literal floating foundation. There's these two big pylons in the water that a boat (ie, the foundation) kind of hooks onto it, and so the foundation/building slides up and down with the change of sea level.

CB: Is climate change what you see as the primary challenge facing design professionals today? What are the other big issues facing architects, designers, builders, remodelers, etc, do this year’s films address?

KB: We're in climate crisis, and the only way we're gonna get out of it is by designing our way out of it. We can't reduce our way out of it—I don’t see us going backwards in society. So we're going to design it. We're going to capture carbon. We’re going to change the way we get energy, and the way we use energy. So that's just a big issue for everyone.

But then we have other things that our films look at. We have a film called The Power of Utopia, and it's really about Le Corbusier and his urban planning. And did he design a utopian masterpiece or modernist disaster? It’s been 70 years since Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh in India, and it's really looking at the big issues it raised.

Another film we’re featuring, Skin of Glass, has a kind of political and building angle. It’s about this modernist building in Brazil from the 1960s (pictured right). And it's kind of the pride of Brazil. It's a beautiful, modernist kind of museum building. When the politics changed in the ‘60s and they had a very authoritarian government come in, the building then became this kind of central police station. But it was this really nasty police force, and the building became a horrible kind of place. Then in the 80s, that government got kicked out. There was another government in Brazil that came in, and the building, and really all these buildings downtown, just ended up sitting empty. Then again, the building changed when some housing activist came in and started using the space to house the homeless, and it became this crazy space. The filmmaker is the daughter of the architect who designed the original building, and really she tells the story of how buildings change, how their uses and usefulness change.

I think architecture issues and building issues are the same as all the issues in the world. What’s different is the way we deal with them. We deal with them as builders and makers and architects, and that manifests in different ways.

CB: Skin of Glass in particular raises an issue central to architecture, which is this dichotomy between the desire to build quality structures that last and the realities of living in a society that seems to embrace fast change and planned obsolescence. How do we reconcile those things in architecture?

KB: I believe we should design our buildings to last much longer than they do.  There’s economic incentive as well as environmental incentive to build buildings that last longer. And it's just nuts to build buildings to last 20 years, unless you design it in a way that it could be pulled apart and fully recycled to be built into something else. We have to change the way we think and the way we treat our environment. And building, putting all the time and natural resources needed to make a building that you think is only going to be for 20 or 30 years is just outdated, old fashioned, foolish thinking on an environmental and on an economic level. We just have to change that. And it’s not just the architecture, it's the developers, builders, everybody, we all have to be in this together.

CB: To wrap it up, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about any films that stand out to you in any particular way this year.

KB: So, I look at all the films, and they all standout for specific reasons, but I think one of the ones that maybe people should look at a little bit more closely this year is a film called Rehab (from rehab). It's an exploration of a building that was done in 2002, a rehabilitation center in Basel, Switzerland, by Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron. And it is an amazing building on a lot of levels, and an amazing film. The filmmakers are really fantastic. They've done 20 architecture films. This film explores the building through all these little vignettes. And by the end of the movie, you understand the building, how it works, what it's like. And it addresses a really interesting problem: How do we build healthcare facilities that help people heal more than just by the sciences of doctors? And the building is a part of that. It’s definitely a sleeper film people should check out.