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ADFF, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, is returning to the TIFF Lightbox next week,November 12-15, 2025, opening Wednesday evening, continuing on Thursday and Friday evenings, and going all day on Saturday, with sixteen screenings in total plus a special event, the Big Brutal Quiz!
Wednesday's big opening takes place in the voluminous Cinema 2; Identity: A Czech Graphic Design Love Story where we are welcome to the sumptuously built city of Prague, and in fact travel all over Czechia with the affable and erudite Nicholas Lowry, investigating the country's design tradition, and by extension its national identity. The evening wraps up with an opening night party at a nearby venue.
Screenings on the following days take place in cinemas 3 and 4, with two options during each period.
Thursday evening offers four screenings: Miralles, about the famed, visionary Catalan architect Enric Miralles and his work, including the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, completed after his untimely death. Søren Pihlmann: Make Materials Matter focuses on the Danish architect's mission to reduce waste as he renovates a pavilion at the Venice Bienniale, giving its existing materials new life, while Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build Life delves into Warren, Vermont, where Yale-trained architects settled en masse, creating a culture of design, creativity, and craftsmanship. Finally on Thursday, what will surely attract great interest in Toronto, Kensington Market: Heart of the City, charts our famous neighbourhood as it navigates redevelopment pressures while fighting to retain its quirky charm and independent spirit.
Friday kicks off the weekend with three more screenings plus the special event. The Space Architect takes us into orbit, where the late architect Constance Adams' work imagined for NASA how humans would live beyond the reach of gravity, while Building on the Edge takes us nearly as far: Antarctica! Here, with scientists living at the McMurdo Station fed up with their poorly designed accommodations, they engaged the University of Colorado’s Master of Architecture Design/Build class to make the place somewhere worth more than just a visit. At the Garden's Pace drops is into a far greener habitat, a botanical garden dedicated to conifers in Hilversum, The Netherlands, where a modern pavilion is being built by its architects, themselves.
The cheekily named Big Brutal Quiz rounds off Friday night with ADFF's first quiz show, hosted by architect and Toronto Society of Architects' Executive Director Joël León Danis. No architectural style has stalked sci-fi film like Brutalism has, most often meant to unsettle the audience with vast concrete dystopias. Is it just misunderstood? Over 20 film clips will test the audience's knowledge of legendary Brutalist buildings across the planet.
Saturday afternoon starts up with a trip to Brazil's Parque Campana in We The Others, where brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana's work meshing community, craft, and nature culminates, while Tracing Light is director Thomas Riedelsheimer's treatise on light as material and force, quoting Renzo Piano "Light is not just something that allows us to see. It is a material that gives form, emotion, and life to architecture." Changing Lines concerns a grassroots effort by residents of Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY, to transform a fast four-lane road into a complete street after a beloved local teacher dies in a hit-and-run, playing opposite another chance to catch Miralles. Living in a Piece of Furniture delves into the houses of Dutch De Stijl-school architect Gerit Rietveld, with another screening of The Space Architect playing at the same time. Lewerentz Divine Darkness — the story of an enigmatic Swedish functionalist architect — settles into the evening opposite the last screening, another chance to catch the opener Identity: A Czech Graphic Design Love Story.
Tickets for all of the films and the quiz can be purchased here. Have a great event!
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