February 22–February 25, 2018
The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) is the nation’s largest film festival devoted to the creative spirit that drives architecture and design. Join us for the inaugural festival in D.C. Over the course of four days, the Festival screens films that explore the life and work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Bjarke Ingels, and journalist, author, and activist Jane Jacobs, and timely topics such as design for positive social change and generative healthcare design.
ADFF: D.C. presented by the Revada Foundation begins with an Opening Night celebration and screening of BIG TIME. The Museum will be the venue for all films, featuring three separate theaters, two of which will be specially outfitted for the festival, including the Museum’s iconic Great Hall.
Throughout the festival food and drinks are available for purchase.
Director: Kaspar Astrup Schröder
2017 / 93 min / Denmark
Architect Bjarke Ingels made a name for himself and for his design firm BIG in his native Denmark, winning international acclaim for his bold, untraditional designs. Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder follows Ingels over six years as he takes on his largest project yet, relocating to New York City to create VIA 57 and then getting the commission for the new 2 World Trade Center. How will the maverick genius balance his professional ambition and personal life when given the chance to change the city’s iconic skyline?
Playing with BIG TIME:
Midtown: A Blueprint for Better
2017 / 4 min / USA
Duvall Decker has helped bring about positive changes in Midtown, a neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi.
AIA / I Look Up Film Challenge 2017
Thursday, February 22, 7 pm; Opening Reception begins at 6 pm
Thursday, February 22, 7:15 pm SOLD OUT
Thursday, February 22, 7:30 pm SOLD OUT
Director: Sarah Howitt
2016 / 59 min / UK
This is the fascinating story of Maggie’s, a unique cancer charity. In 1993, Maggie Keswick Jencks was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told she had three months to live. On hearing this devastating news she was left to sit on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor. The only place she could find to cry was a bathroom stall. Her husband and co-founder Charles Jencks, said, “I think that initial shock was certainly the moment when Maggie thought we can do better than this. You don’t have to suffer in a corridor on death row having just been told that you are going to die. That was the moment architecture and medicine met in our minds.”
In the last year of her life, Maggie spent her time working on an idea for a cancer center which she hoped would change the lives of other cancer sufferers. Since her death the most prominent names in architecture from Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and others have designed astonishing landmark buildings bearing her name.
Playing with Building Hope: The Maggie’s Centres:
Community by Design: Skid Row Housing Trust
Director: Myles Kramer
2017 / 4 min / USA /
Los Angeles has the highest number of unsheltered people in the country. The Skid Row Housing Trust in downtown Los Angeles provides both housing for the homeless and innovative solutions to keep them off the streets. In 1989 the Trust began restoring and preserving single room occupancy housing in the downtown area. Currently, the Trust focuses on new construction projects while collaborating with renowned architects, like Michael Maltzan Architecture and Brooks + Scarpa. The portfolio of buildings that the Trust owns is steadily expanding, using a model that can be replicated in any city.
Saturday, February 24, 12:15 pm SOLD OUT
Director: Matt Tyrnauer
2016 / 92 min / USA
The film highlights Jane Jacobs’ magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she single-handedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs, a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority seems at first glance to share little in common with Moses, a high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city. In three suspenseful acts, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City gives audiences a front row seat to this battle, and shows how two opposing visions of urban greatness continue to ripple across the world stage, with unexpectedly high stakes.
Director: Kogonada
2017 / 104 min / USA / Fiction
With its naturalistic rhythms, its focus on architecture and empathy for the complexities of families, debut director Kogonada’s Columbus unfolds as a gently drifting, deeply absorbing conversation. With strong supporting turns from Parker Posey, Rory Culkin, and Michelle Forbes, Columbus is also a showcase for the director’s striking eye for the way physical space can affect emotions.
When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin (John Cho) finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana—a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library. As their intimacy develops, Jin and Casey explore both the town and their conflicted emotions: Jin’s estranged relationship with his father, and Casey’s reluctance to leave Columbus and her mother.
Director: Reiner Holzemer
2017 / 90 min / Belgium, Germany
For the first time fashion designer Dries Van Noten allows a filmmaker to accompany him in his creative process and rich home life. For an entire year Reiner Holzemer documents the precise steps that Dries takes to conceive of four collections —the rich fabrics, embroidery and prints exclusive to his designs, as well as the emblematic fashion shows that bring his collections to the world and have become cult must-sees at Paris Fashion Week.
This film offers an insight into the life, mind and creative heart of a master fashion designer who, for more than 25 years, has remained independent in a landscape of fashion consolidation and globalization. The film features original music by Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, Matthew Herbert, and Sam Petts-Davies.
Director: Jason Cohn & Bill Jersey
2011 / 84 min / Ireland and USA
From 1941 to 1978, the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames brought unique talents to their partnership. He was an architect by training; she was a painter and sculptor. Together they are considered America’s most important and influential designers, whose work helped shape the second half of the 20th century and remains culturally vital and commercially popular today.
Eames: The Architect and the Painter, insightfully narrated by James Franco, is the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths—and the only one that peers deeply inside the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured love for one another. Despite their unrivaled impact on American design, the personas of the steadfastly private Charles and Ray have remained oblique beyond the giddy publicity photos they doled out to inquiring journalists while they were alive.
Director: Chad Freidrichs
2017 / 95 min / USA
In the 1960s, frustrated by the growing problem of urban pollution, Athelstan Spilhaus, a visionary scientist and futurist comic strip writer, assembled a team of experts to develop a bold experiment: the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC). MXC would be the city of the future, a domed metropolis for 250,000 pioneering residents, built from scratch and using cutting-edge technology to prevent urban sprawl and pollution. Things didn’t quite go as planned, as explored in Chad Friedrichs’ fascinating look back at the would-be city of tomorrow.
Director: Mina Chow
2017 / 57 min / USA
Daughter of immigrants, an idealistic architect struggles to keep her dream alive as she journeys to discover why America abandoned World’s Fairs. For generations of Americans, World’s Fairs captured visions of hope for the future as part of their collective memory. Mina Chow became fascinated with World’s Fairs when she saw pictures of her parents at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Beginning with their stories, Mina shares this legacy and the American values that inspired her to become an architect. She is excited to go to the 1st World’s Fair in China. With over 73 million visitors, the Shanghai World Expo breaks all attendance records for any event in human history. But what she discovers there not only destroys her confidence as an American architect; it is symptomatic of a country that has lost its way. With her dream destroyed, Mina begins a search for answers: to find out what happened to the vision of World’s Fairs, and what happened to America.
Playing with Face of a Nation: What Happened to the World’s Fair?:
The Future of Cities
Director: Oscar Boyson
2016 / 18 min / USA
What does “the future of cities” mean? For most of the developing world, it might be as simple as aspiring to having your own toilet, rather than sharing one with over 100 people. For a family in Detroit, it could mean having non-toxic drinking water. For planners and mayors, it’s about a lot of things — sustainability, economy, inclusivity, and resilience. Most of us can hope that future involves spending a little less time on our commutes to work and a little more time with our families. Oscar Boyson asked people around the world to participate in documenting city innovations around the world. Folks of all ages, from over 75 countries, volunteered their time, thoughts, work, and footage.
Director: Don Hahn
2017 / 58 min / USA
The Gamble House is the incredible story of brothers Charles and Henry Greene who were pushed by their forceful father into a career in architecture only to design and build the most seminal and stunning Arts & Crafts house in America. The house, however, did not come without its price, both personally and professionally, for the Greene brothers, and for David and Mary Gamble who commissioned it. It’s a tale of American craftsmanship, international influence, artistic frustration, loss and triumph, which led to the completion of one of the shining examples of American architecture, known to fans of Back to the Future as Doc Brown’s house, and fans of architecture simply as The Gamble House.
Playing with The Gamble House:
Ford House
Director: Spirit of Space
2017 / 5 min / USA
This film about the Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, designed by Bruce Goff, was created for the installation Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A film by Spirit of Space.
A Letter to Marcel
Director: Jake Farmer
2016 / 3 min / USA
In 1953 Robert Snower wrote to Marcel Breuer to ask if he would be interested in designing a home for his family in Kansas City. Breuer and his team spent the next year working with Mr. Snower to customize every element of the home. It was completed in 1954 and is one of only two houses Breuer constructed west of the Mississippi River. Over 60 years later the home has been restored to its original condition. This is the story of its creation.
Director: Sally Aitken
2015 / 59 min / Australia
The University of Technology, Sydney’s new business school, is Frank Gehry’s daring “Treehouse project,” otherwise known as the “crumpled brown paper bag” to its critics. At first sight, the school will almost certainly shock anyone not already familiar with Gehry’s work elsewhere around the world. The film follows the drama as Gehry’s vision for this commission is realized. Through the construction of this building, we examine his challenging work over a period of 40 years. Four key phases of creativity, epitomized by four great buildings—The Gehry House, The Vitra Museum, The Guggenheim Bilbao and MIT’s Stata Centre—chart the evolution of ideas over a lifetime of controversy to play out on the downtown Sydney construction site.
Playing with Getting Frank Gehry:
This Was Not My Dream
Director: Gabriel Kogan & Pedro Kok
2016 / 5 min / Brazil
“Suzana only thinks of the house, she is in love with it.” Suzana’s ex-husband cannot get it out of his mind that the new house—conceived by them both—meant the end of his marriage. The ex-husband’s jealous looks are meant for nobody else other than the straight and modern lines, “cold, tedious and without life.” While images pass through the architecture he distills his fear of the construction and elaborates about the new life that Suzana will be enjoying at that place. “Where is Suzana now?” She couldn’t be in any other place except that house, where Suzana’s love is so transparent.
Director: Catherine Hunter
2017 / 59 min / Australia
Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place explores the life and art of Australia’s most famous living architect. With a bevy of international awards, including the prestigious Pritzker Prize, Murcutt has put Australian architecture on the map. Yet, by choice, he has never built outside his own country. Murcutt’s focus instead has been the creation of energy-efficient masterpieces perfectly suited to their environment, and his breakthrough designs have influenced architects around the world. This documentary follows Glenn Murcutt, now 80 years old, as he designs his most ambitious project to date—a mosque for an Islamic community in Melbourne.
Playing with Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place:
Writers Theater
Director: Spirit of Space
2016 / 3 min / USA
Studio Gang’s design for the Writers Theater in Glencoe, Illinois is intended to maximize the theater’s potential to bring people together, creating an architecture that energizes the daily life of its community and becomes an exciting, region-wide cultural destination.
Director: Patrick Creadon
2012 / 77 min / USA
From the director of Wordplay and I.O.U.S.A. comes a captivating look at a radically innovative approach to education. If You Build It follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie County, the poorest county in North Carolina, where they work with local high school students to transform both their community and their lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting a change-resistant school board, Pilloton and Miller lead their students through a year-long design and build project that does much more than just teach basic construction skills: it shows thirteen teenagers the power of design-thinking to re-invent not just their town, but their own sense of what’s possible.
Director: Joseph Clement
2016 / 62 min / Canada
After Euclid, Toronto’s Jim Stewart is the most published mathematician in the world. Stewart spent a decade and a small fortune building the home of his dreams to reflect his two obsessions: curves and music. The completed home, called Integral House, provides him with both. A stunning architectural gem of subtly curved wood and vast, evocative spaces, the house stands in Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood and is considered one of the city’s best performance spaces. Stewart took joy in hosting his trademark musical evenings with world-class guests, including the likes of Grammy-nominated Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman, featured in the film. This debut film by landscape designer and artist Joseph Clement is an impressive work of art with its masterful combination of beautiful soundscapes and gorgeous architectural details. It ultimately delivers a finely crafted portrait of Stewart and his beloved home.
Playing with Integral Man:
Cabin at the River
Director: Silvia Zeitlinger
2017 / 8 min / Italy
The architect Robby Cantarutti, as a boy, is imagining his house and his life while sitting on a river throwing stones in the water. Foreseeing his future life with his wife and children he fills the empty rooms of his house with vivified joy, creativity and happiness. Dream and life are intertwined and reality is flowing past like the water of the river.
Director: Mark Noonan
2017 / 81 min / Ireland
Still working at age 95, Pritzker Prize-winning, Irish-American architect Kevin Roche is an enigma. He’s reached the top of his profession, but has little interest in celebrity and eschews the label “starchitect.” Despite a lifetime of acclaimed work that includes the Ford Foundation, Oakland Museum of California, and 40 years designing new galleries for The Metropolitan Museum in New York, he has no intention of ever retiring and keeps looking forward. Roche’s architectural philosophy focuses on creating “a community for a modern society” and he has been credited with creating green buildings before they became part of the public consciousness.
Director: Thatcher Bean
2017 / 65 min / USA
In the center of Equator Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ilima community remains one of the most isolated in the world. The people have coexisted with endangered wildlife in the surrounding forest for generations, but as the pace of development has increased, this fragile ecosystem has suffered.
They partnered with the African Wildlife Foundation and MASS Design Group in 2012 to create a new conservation-focused primary school and community center. This film documents the collective building process—one aimed at leveraging local craft and ecological knowledge towards education, preservation, and beauty.
Playing with Made in Ilima:
Pisces
Director: Brad Deal
2017 / 3 min / USA
Pisces, from Greek mythology, takes the form of two fish connected by a cord that allows them to help others and ensures that they don’t lose one another. Pisces and its myths are the framework for the Louisiana Tech School of Design’s 2017 design/build project. A bridge that provides a much needed connection between the two sides of a summer camp for children with special needs also creates a variety of opportunities for one of their favorite camp activities, fishing.
Like Pisces’ chord, the project forever links the student designers to the campers they served through their first built work. This short film by Brad Deal, architect and director of the ARCH 335 design/build studio at Louisiana Tech, provides a glimpse of the connections formed between three students and three camper’s families over the course of the project and is framed by the blossoming efforts in design education to connect students to their communities and discover the power of design to bring about positive change.
Director: Mike Dorsey
2012 / 46 min / USA
In 1959, a working-class government employee in the tiny desert town of Lone Pine, California, asked world-famous modern architect Richard Neutra to design his modest family home. To his surprise, Neutra agreed. Thus began an unlikely friendship that would last for the rest of Neutra’s life. The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat tells the story of this house and its stunning desert setting, through interviews with Richard Oyler, actress Kelly Lynch, who currently owns the house, Neutra’s two sons, and well-known LA real estate agent Crosby Doe.
Playing with The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat:
Windshield: A Vanished Vision
Director: Elissa Brown
2016 / 46 min / USA
Windshield: A Vanished Vision reveals an intimate portrait of a 1930s patrician couple, a leading modern architect, and the story of the ill-fated house they create. John Nicholas Brown’s fascination with modernism, innovation and the rapidly-evolving American building scene spurs him to commission what he hopes will be a “distinguished monument in the history of architecture.” Brown and his wife Anne, herself a daring and eccentric figure, select the young and ambitious Richard Neutra to build them a house that they name “Windshield.” Through an enormously detailed correspondence, patron and architect discuss every detail of the house’s design and together pursue cutting-edge technology, much of which had only previously been used in commercial architecture. Then, just weeks after the Browns move in, tragedy strikes. Windshield: A Vanished Vision explores the pivotal impact of the house on Neutra’s career and takes us on a journey with a couple caught between the values of their upbringings and their evolving social ideals. Visually supported by John Nicholas Browns’ evocative home movies, the film features J. Carter Brown’s inspiring lecture about the summer house of his youth and voices of architectural historians such as Thomas S. Hines and Dietrich Neumann.
Director: Tomas Koolhaas
2016 / 75 min / USA
REM, the documentary by Rem Koolhaas’s son, explores the architect’s life, working methods, philosophy, and internal landscape, from a never seen perspective of intimacy and immediacy. This point of view allows the viewer to understand Rem’s ideas in a way they couldn’t otherwise. These ideas are not merely explained as intellectual concepts but also in practice—the reality on the ground, fruition in concrete and metal. The film shows how these structures, some massive and some small, all over the world, affect every aspect of the lives of the people that built them, use them, and live inside them.
Director: Elissa Brown
2016 / 46 min / USA
Windshield: A Vanished Vision reveals an intimate portrait of a 1930s patrician couple, a leading modern architect, and the story of the ill-fated house they create. John Nicholas Brown’s fascination with modernism, innovation and the rapidly-evolving American building scene spurs him to commission what he hopes will be a “distinguished monument in the history of architecture.” Brown and his wife Anne, herself a daring and eccentric figure, select the young and ambitious Richard Neutra to build them a house that they name “Windshield.” Through an enormously detailed correspondence, patron and architect discuss every detail of the house’s design and together pursue cutting-edge technology, much of which had only previously been used in commercial architecture. Then, just weeks after the Browns move in, tragedy strikes. Windshield: A Vanished Vision explores the pivotal impact of the house on Neutra’s career and takes us on a journey with a couple caught between the values of their upbringings and their evolving social ideals. Visually supported by John Nicholas Browns’ evocative home movies, the film features J. Carter Brown’s inspiring lecture about the summer house of his youth and voices of architectural historians such as Thomas S. Hines and Dietrich Neumann.
Playing with Windshield: A Vanished Vision:
The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat
Director: Mike Dorsey
2012 / 46 min / USA
In 1959, a working-class government employee in the tiny desert town of Lone Pine, California, asked world-famous modern architect Richard Neutra to design his modest family home. To his surprise, Neutra agreed. Thus began an unlikely friendship that would last for the rest of Neutra’s life. The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat tells the story of this house and its stunning desert setting, through interviews with Richard Oyler, actress Kelly Lynch, who currently owns the house, Neutra’s two sons, and well-known LA real estate agent Crosby Doe.
Please note that The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat will screen before Windshield.
Director: Gary Hustwit
2016 / 66 min / USA
Workplace is a documentary about the past, present and future of the office. Hundreds of millions of human beings spend billions of hours in offices every day. How can we make them better places for people to work and collaborate? What’s the next wave of digital tools to connect the office, the city and the planet? How has the office evolved over the last 100 years? And do we even need offices anymore? Filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized) follows the design and construction of the New York headquarters of R/GA, where the company and architects Foster + Partners explore the intersection of digital and physical space. Workplace is a look at the thinking and experimentation involved in trying to create the next evolution of what the office could be. Appearanes by Bob Greenberg, Norman Foster, Nick Law, Barry Wacksman, Chris West, Julia Goldberg, Primo Orpilla, Nikil Saval, Amanda Carroll, and more.
ADFF: D.C. is presented by the Revada Foundation, courtesy of the estates of Reva and David Logan. Additional Support is provided by:
