ADFF:NY 2026 Screening: Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano)

Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano)
2026 / 86 mins / USA
Director: Jonathan Goodman Levitt
World Premiere

Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano) is a meditation on the often-invisible impact of architecture, told through the experiences of people who use and maintain buildings designed by Renzo Piano and his colleagues.

Across four continents, daily routines unfold at four recently built civic spaces — a Greek cultural center (The SNFCC, Athens), Ugandan children’s hospital (Emergency Hospital, Entebbe), American art museum (The Whitney, New York), and Chinese industrial park (OōEli Complex, Hangzhou) — as well as at the iconic Centre Pompidou (Paris), which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2027. At each location, in turn, we meet student interns and gardeners, doctors and their patients, security guards and museum visitors, maintenance workers, and impending retirees. Key moments of growth and revelation unfold across their stories, each linked to their built environments. In symbiosis with the buildings around them, they not only inhabit the buildings, but transform them into “living organisms” of great influence.

Co-presented by Zahner