The Brooklyn Rail

“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.”

For documentary filmmaker Jason Cohn, who has had two films featured in the festival series over the years, learning about design changed the way he viewed the world. “Our lives are shaped in a lot of ways by the work of architects and designers that create the world that we walk through every day,” Cohn said. “That effort is so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. If you go on the Pacific Crest Trail, hiking for a month, after a while you stop noticing the trees. That’s where we all are with the built environment… we’re just blind to it because it’s the water we swim in.”

Cohn’s film Modernism, Inc, featured in the 2023 season of the festival, explored the life of architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes, who ushered in the modern era of corporate design through his work consulting for companies like IBM and Mobil (it was Noyes who brought in the designers of their iconic logos). The film “dramatizes how far American corporate culture has gone,” Cohn explained. “IBM [was] a leading corporation in the 1930s and 1940s that had a very strong sense of its own identity, and a strong identity in the broader culture. When you look at [that 1930s culture] now, it’s so old-fashioned, so stuck in this pre-modern past.” If Eliot Noyes took IBM’s corporate design into the modern era, creating the corporation’s unified brand language, Cohn argued, it set the stage for Steve Jobs and Jony Ive (the designer behind the iPod and iPhone), to give Apple its own novel brand identity. “They were looking at what IBM did,” Cohn said. “That’s what led them to bring corporate design all the way to where we are now.”

In some ways, architecture lends itself to film, Cohn explained. “Architecture and design are, by definition, visual,” he said. However, not all architectural stories inherently possess the essential elements of drama. “You’re looking for something with an arc and with some conflict,” Cohn explained. “Making beautiful things, serially, one after another, is not a very interesting story.”

In Modernism, Inc, Cohn found his conflict in striking footage of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, an initiative established in 1951 for industrial designers to exchange ideas with other conservatively dressed, soft-spoken professionals like Noyes. However, in 1970, the conference was disrupted by a garrulous group of hippies who sought to raise their anti-capitalist and environmentalist concerns. “I take these designers and I try to place them in their historical context, their time context, so you see them as people struggling to work in a very specific moment of time,” Cohn said. “Their work changes according to changes in society.”

Denise Zmekhol’s Skin of Glass (2023), also featured in the 2023 slate of films, represented another striking architectural story with human dimensions. Zmekhol’s father, Roger Zmekhol (1928–1976), was a prolific architect in Brazil who, in the 1960s, designed a glass-walled office tower in São Paulo known as the “Pele de Vidro”—in Portuguese, the “skin of glass.” However, what the architect conceived as a vision of Brazil’s future took on a darker tone when the tower became the headquarters of the federal police under a repressive Brazilian dictatorship; in 2003, the building was abandoned. Plans to salvage the landmark as a cultural center were scuttled by the 2008 global economic crisis, and the building took on a new, unexpected life as an illegal squatter settlement. Though Denise Zmekhol initially sought to interview the inhabitants, their community leaders refused her request. Finally, in a harrowing moment captured with drone photography, a fire swept through and leveled the building, killing many of its inhabitants. From that point, Zmekhol’s documentary took on a new, urgent tone as it engaged with the survivors of the encampment. Within the narrative of Skin of Glass, ADFF festival programmer Ruth Somalo said, were “the promises and failures of the state of Brazil—the politics of an era.”

The film’s extraordinary story aside, you might still be asking—just how many architectural-themed documentaries are produced every year? The answer may surprise you. “We consistently now get 350-plus films submitted to the festival,” Kyle Bergman said. “They come from all over the world.” Christine Abbate, a publicist who works with ADFF, added that “Kyle watches everything. I often talk to him, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I got to go watch two films now.’” That kind of attention to detail earned Bergman praise from filmmakers such as Jason Cohn. “His energy is just perfect for this festival,” Cohn said. “He’s very modest and puts the filmmakers forward.”

And though the ADFF has gone afield from North America before, occasionally hosting smaller events in places like Cairo and Athens, in 2025 ADFF will travel to Mumbai for the first time. “It’s an amazing city,” Bergman said. “It’s very exciting to be bringing these films to another part of the world in such a concentrated way.”

In referring to the example of Doshi, Ruth Somalo emphasized the link between architecture and storytelling. “Maybe I can use a quote from Balkrishna Doshi, where he says that architecture is storytelling—it’s a journey, a dialogue, a discovery of who you really are,” Somalo said. “That’s exactly the way I feel about filmmaking. Films are storytelling, which is at the core of what makes us human.”

1. My Architect (2003) is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel.