LAF: Summer Architecture Festival 2026

Architecture is a portrait of the person behind it. Behind the façades of iconic buildings lie ambitions and doubts, creative breakthroughs and political schemes, love, disappointment, and the urge to leave a mark on history. The 2026 Summer Architecture Festival LAF is back with a selection of films that treat architecture not just as an art form, but as a living story of human ideas and destinies.

The opening film will be "L'inconnu de la Grande Arche" ("The Great Arch") – a title selected for the "Un Certain Regard" programme at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for four César Awards. Through the eyes of the Danish architect Otto von Spreckelsen, who finds himself thrust into the unfamiliar world of French bureaucracy and political intrigue, audiences will witness the story behind the creation of Paris's Grande Arche de la Défense – and the personal drama of its creator.

From there, the journey continues across the globe, guided by some of architecture's most remarkable masters. This year's programme invites audiences into the meditative, enigmatic world of the Swedish modernist Sigurd Lewerentz, and introduces the quiet poetry of the Venetian Carlo Scarpa. The Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz demonstrates that architecture can exist in harmony with nature, rather than opposing it. Two stops await in Spain – portraits of two significant but radically different creators: Enric Miralles and Óscar Tusquets Blanca.

But LAF is about more than just films on great architects. It's also a conversation about cities as living organisms. Audiences will travel to India with Le Corbusier and visit his utopian city of Chandigarh, conceived as the ideal city of the future. We will also see how the residents of Brooklyn are fighting for the right to shape the future of their own neighbourhood. These are stories of utopias meeting reality, ideas colliding with politics, time, and change.

What unites every film in the programme is a shared desire to understand how space shapes us – and how we, in turn, reshape the world around us.

All films are shown in their original languages with Russian subtitles.