Kyle Bergman, Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) founder and director, along with sponsor Elle Décor, hosted a sneak preview last week for the fourth annual film festival, which will run from October 18-21. Sponsors include Architectural Record, Audi, Waterworks, Sciame, Lladro, Scavolini and Resource Furniture. MAS will organize an Audi-sponsored driving tour of significant buildings. This year, the downtown location will include a Rizzoli pop-up store. Panel discussions will include Massimo Vignelli, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.

The complete lineup of nearly 30 films will be announced in September, but several will focus on design duos. One of the films, "Design is One", follows Massimo and Lella Vignelli of Vignelli Associates, designers of legendary logos and corporate identities for Knoll, Bloomingdale's, American Airlines and Ford in addition to NYC's 1972 subway map, pictured here:



In conversation after the screening, the Milan-born Massimo Vignelli, Bergman and Elle Décor's Creative Director Florentino Pamintuan discussed the legendary designer's thoughts on the state of the industry.

Vignelli says, "My goal was simple - to affect the lives of millions of people through design! Fifty years ago, everything in the US was cluttered, and the most modern things when I arrived in NYC were those white brick buildings on Third Avenue." When asked of his working relationship with his wife, Vignelli replied, "Talent is like a Ferrari without the brakes. Lella's great skill is criticism -- she's the brakes to my design output." He continued, "A design is finished when you can't take anything else away. We design in a reductive way at our office." The commission he'd most like to take on? "I'd love to design the Vatican. The symbol [cross] is OK, but everything else has to go. It's all so kitsch."