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Design nerds, rejoice! Architecture & Design Film Festival returns to New York this October

ADFF

Design nerds, rejoice! Architecture & Design Film Festival returns to New York this October

A still from Fredrik Gertten's PUSH. (Courtesy the ADFF)

It’s back: The 11th edition of New York’s Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) is set to bring interesting buildings and the people who design them to the silver screen this October.

The five-day event is the largest design-focused film fest in the U.S., with almost 30 films that explore the structures and people who shape space. The kickoff event is an October 2 walk through SoHo centered on short films. The main event, meanwhile, will begin on October 16, halfway through Archtober, the all-things-buildings celebration hosted by the Center for Architecture. All of the films will be screened at Cinépolis Chelsea on West 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue.

This year, festivalgoers will get to see City Dreamers, a documentary on four pioneering woman architects: Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Center for Architecture; Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the landscape architect behind Expo 67’s Children’s Creative Center; and Denise Scott Brown, the queen of pomo. The architect and planner Blanche Lemco van Ginkel will also get her due. Ginkel was the first woman dean of a North American architecture school (the University of Toronto) and designed the roof of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing complex in Marseille. She and her husband Sandy van Ginkel also worked on an ahead-of-its-time scheme for a car-free Midtown Manhattan that included an orange electric mini-bus (the Ginklevan) that would transport passengers around the area.

Photo of a house with red roof in an empty landscape
A still from Boris Bertram’s The Human Shelter. (Courtesy the ADFF)

Another notable doc will make its U.S. debut: The New Bauhaus, a film on Hungarian émigré László Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian artist who helped spread Bauhaus ideas through Chicago’s IIT. PUSH, a documentary about the commodification of housing around the world and the role of global financing in fueling the affordable housing crisis, will give viewers a taste of global urbanism, as opposed to straight design.

Panels, Q&As, and books for sale will round out the programming. If you’re looking to cop tickets, they’ll be on sale on September 16, while a full program will be released on September 5.


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