The Architecture and Design Film Festival is held in different city locations – New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Chicago and recently, Mumbai. Last month, we had a taster in London. Location is also a fundamental part of the process of film-making, and an essential one if the topic is architecture.

Location has played an even greater part in film since the arrival of the drone – so much cheaper and better than helicopter footage. No Netflix thriller is complete without an overhead introduction to the location, delivering valuable touristic appetisers.

Directors with an architectural background bring more than a filmmaker's instinct to their work. They bring what may be called an 'architectural eye'. Antonioni framed modernist alienation in plazas, towers and facades. Peter Greenaway's work feels like a building: layered, symmetrical, concerned with geometry and proportion, while Satyajit Ray's sense of mise-en-scène as well as spatial rhythm has a certain architectural deftness.

The built environment is not simply a backdrop, but a protagonist in its own right. Location, thus, does more than situate; it also perpetuates architecture on film.

Often, property developers say 'location, location, location' is all-important. And so it is for architecture and placemaking, festivals and filmmaking. The much-anticipated, and overdue, new location for ADFF:STIR in London, is one for the books.