The Architecture & Design Film Festival, a touring international film festival, returns to Chicago next week. The festival runs Thursday, February 19, through Sunday, February 22, at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Gene Siskel Film Center. The festival's local presenter is the Chicago Architecture Center.
The opening night film will be Prickly Mountain and My Design-Build Life by adventure-filmmaker Allie Rood, a backcountry skier who tells the story of the Vermont mountain town where she grew up. The event will be at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater. Rood’s documentary includes original music by Grammy-nominated fellow Vermonter Grace Potter, a producer on the film.
The festival lineup—all Chicago premieres—highlights issues such as sustainability, housing and community resilience as well as design philosophy, visual identity and artistic legacy.
The 10 feature-length films, all described below, are selected for their cinematic quality and their ability to expand public appreciation of architecture and design beyond professional circles. Screenings will be accompanied by talkbacks with directors and architects and conversations that connect films with the communities and contexts they portray.
Founded in 2009, the Architecture & Design Film Festival celebrates the creative spirit that drives architecture and design. Through a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, ADFF creates an opportunity to educate, entertain, and engage all types of people who are excited about architecture and design. It’s the world’s largest film festival devoted to the subject with an annual festival in New York and satellite events around the world. For more information, visit https://adfilmfest.com/.
Thursday, February 19 – Opening Night, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.
7pm:Prickly Mountain and My Design-Build Life. (Dir: Allie Rood; 90 min. | USA | 2025 | English) Filmmaker Allie Rood in attendance. Prickly Mountain and My Design-Build Life takes us to Warren, Vermont, a remarkable small town with more architects and designers per capita than anywhere else in the USA. Warren became an architect’s haven in the 1960s when a group of Yale-trained architects settled there, embracing collaboration and hands-on craftsmanship over the corporate world of their contemporaries. Director Allie Rood, who grew up there, offers an insider’s perspective on a place where design is a way of life.
Friday, February 20, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
6:30pm: Identity: A Czech Graphic Design Love Story. (Dirs.: Kateřina Mikulcova, Petr Smelik; 90 min. | Czech Republic | 2024 | English) What does a country’s design aesthetic reveal about its identity? This documentary pairs cultural inquiry with personal narrative. At its center is Nicholas Lowry, a Czech-American auctioneer and obsessive collector who returns to his ancestral homeland to investigate a design tradition, a national identity and himself. Lowry travels across the Czech Republic—from Zlín to Brno, Litomyšl to Pilsen—encountering the visual language of design legends like Alfons Mucha, Ladislav Sutnarand Josef Váchal.
8:45pm: Living in a Piece of Furniture: Gerrit Rietveld’s Houses. (Dir.: Lex Reitsma; 52 min. | Netherlands | 2024 | Dutch with English subtitles) Known for his Red and Blue Chair and the groundbreaking Schröder House, architect Gerrit Rietveld believed that homes should function like living sculptures. Living in a Piece of Furniture focuses on the iconic 1924 Rietveld Schröderhuis, the first house that Rietveld designed. The film explores several more of Rietveld’s private residential projects through the experiences of their current residents, thus revealing how his design philosophy shaped not only the spaces themselves but the lives within them.
Saturday, February 21 – Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
1pm: Building on the Edge. Dirs: Mike Scalisi, Bruce Borowsky; 73 min. | USA | 2025 | English) Architect Erik Summerfield, Director of Colorado Building Workshop, in attendance! Few architects ever have the chance to design buildings for one of the most extreme environments on Earth: Antarctica. Scientists at NOAA took an unconventional leap: they invited the University of Colorado’s Master of Architecture Design-Build class to take on the challenge. Their buildings would need to be built in Colorado, disassembled, shipped to Chile, loaded onto a vessel capable of braving the infamous Drake Passage, and finally transferred by rubber raft to the Antarctic coast, where they’d be reassembled on-site.
3:15pm:Changing Lanes. (Dir.: Ben Wolf; 73 min. | USA | 2025 | English) Filmmaker Ben Wolf in attendance! After a beloved teacher is tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a grassroots movement emerges to transform a notoriously dangerous four-lane boulevard into a safer, two-lane street with protected bike lanes. While many applaud the proposed road diet, it also sparks a backlash. The film situates this local struggle within broader contexts through interviews with politicians, activists, urban planners, entrepreneurs and cultural icons like David Byrne and Janette Sadik-Khan.
5:45pm: Lewerentz Divine Darkness. (Dir.: Sven Blume; 70 min. | Sweden | 2024 | English, Swedish, with English subtitles) Filmmaker Sven Blume in attendance! Sigurd Lewerentz did not seek fame. A contemporary of Alvar Aalto and Gunnar Asplund, Lewerentz left behind some of the most profound works in Scandinavian design. But he shunned interviews and avoided public interventions. Lewerentz Divine Darkness begins decades after the architect’s death, when an unexpected discovery in a root cellar cracks open the mystery of his work: a treasure trove of beautiful black-and-white film clips and audio recordings.
8pm: We the Others. (Dir: Francesca Molteni; 55 min. | Italy | 2024 | English/Italian, with English subtitles) We The Others is a captivating film about Brazilian brothers and design icons Fernando and Humberto Campana whose studio, Estudio Campana, gained international recognition for its unique approach to design. Over the past 40 years, the Campana brothers left an indelible mark on the design world, blurring the lines between art, craft and furniture. The documentary explores Parque Campana, the studio’s latest initiative: an architectural park that is a tribute to creativity.
Sunday, February 22 – Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
1pm: At The Garden’s Pace. (Dir: Juan Benavides; 74 min. | Netherlands | 2024 | English/Dutch with English subtitles) At the Garden’s Pace tracks the design-build process of a striking new modern pavilion within a botanical garden in the Dutch town of Hilversum. Under the watchful eyes of local residents, the architect-builders put on overalls and work shoes and navigate the year-long process.
3:15pm:The Space Architect. (Dir: Rebecca Carpenter; 40 min. | USA | 2025 | English) The Space Architect introduces us to the trailblazing architect Constance Adams, whose groundbreaking work at NASA reimagined how humans might live in outer space. At age 53, knowing she was dying of cancer, Adams enlisted the help of filmmaker Rebecca Carpenter to preserve her story. Filmed just four days before her death, The Space Architect captures Adams reflecting on her extraordinary career and her final, passionate focus toward Earth, where she hoped to apply her knowledge to address the urgent challenges of the climate crisis.
5pm: Miralles (Dir.: Maria Mauti; 90 min. | Spain | 2024 | Spanish, with English subtitles) Miralles is a visually striking journey into the life and work of Catalan architect Enric Miralles, who died just before his 50th birthday. The film revisits the legacy of a visionary who was only beginning to show the full scope of his genius. The film looks back on 11 of his most significant projects, from the emotionally resonant Igualada Cemetery, where he is now buried, to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, a masterpiece he never saw completed.
Full festival information and tickets are available at https://www.architecture.org/events-programs/adff-2026.
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