My Architect

The problem with this film is also its most interesting asset -- the filmmaker. The film sheds little light on Louis Kahn's character or his architectural abilities, and it says basically nothing about architecture whatsoever, so if you are looking for a film about architecture, move along.

Beyond a great number of shots of Lou's sometimes beautiful, sometimes unpleasant buildings, this film is not about architecture.

What it is about, and what it excels in portraying, is a man's search for a father he lost in his youth and with whose ghost he has not yet made peace. Nathaniel Kahn has not made himself a very likable character, and for that I suppose one must respect him. He wavers between cloying innocence and childish sullenness and smugness. I think especially of his near falling-out with his mother. He comes across as downright cruel in not allowing his mother her idealizations and delusions about Lou's intentions toward her. Watching this film, the viewer does see the damage losing a parent does to a young child. Nathaniel is stunted and boyish, and sweet in an altogether unlikeable way. The Nathaniel we are given in this movie haunted by his father and his inability to understand him or to resolve his feelings toward him.

Little Kahn does have a number of interesting interviews with the people who knew his father; it's an interesting study of how greatly people are affected by a single person, how disparate their recollections of the person are, and also, how similar they sometimes are too. Apart from a few biographical facts, this film could have been about anyone who was greatly loved and deeply complicated (i.e., about a quarter of the people most of us know). Did it need to be about Lou Kahn to succeed? No.

My Architect by Nathaniel Kahn is that ancient story, the search for a man's father. Nathaniel was the illegitimate son, the `bastard,' of Louis Kahn, the architect who died in Penn Station, New York, in 1974 coming back from Bangladesh. Kahn had three children, but only one by his wife; the second daughter and only son were by two other women. The architect was a nomad and a man obsessed with his work. He saw Nathaniel and his mother once a week, but Nathaniel never got to know his father well. Lou Kahn died when his son was only eleven, and the secret children and their mothers weren't supposed to come to Lou Kahn's funeral, though they did.

So 25 years after his father's death, at the age of 36, Nathaniel set out to make this film to find out who his father was - and he has done an amazing and triumphant job. He begins with a sketch of Kahn's origins, the fire that disfigured his face (it looked pock-marked), and his early displacement to America. We learn about Kahn's development over time and the sources of his style. They look back to the archaic and the monumental, not to anything his contemporaries did.

Nathaniel visits all the significant people and places in his father's life as well as a number of important architects. He starts out with `the man with the glasses,' Philip Johnson. Johnson talks about what a `nice guy' Kahn was. `All the rest of us were bastards,' he says. Johnson's point is there was a lack of jealousies or rivalry, a selflessness: that focus on the work; it's also clear Kahn is a member of the Johnson pantheon.. I.M. Pei makes one thing emphatically clear: he considers Kahn his superior. `It's quality, not quantity, that matters,' he says rapidly and bluntly when Nathaniel suggests Pei was more `successful.' Kahn may only have completed a few buildings, Pei says, but they are great masterpieces. Later in the film Frank Gehry says Kahn was his original inspiration, that without Lou Kahn, he would not be. It's plain that the most famous architectural figures of our day are all in awe of this man. A failure morally, a man who couldn't do right by the people closest to him in his life, Louis Kahn is perhaps the greatest American architect. That fact emerges as powerfully as do his personal shortcomings.

Nathaniel `interviews' the great buildings, too, most beautifully and movingly. His camera scans their spaces. It peers at them far and near in different lights and shadows. We even see him from far above, roller blading around the space encompassed by the Salk Center in La Jolla, casually making friends with and taking possession of it after an interview with the man Kahn worked with when the center was designed. These viewings of the buildings, a revelation of the man's achievement, presented for the most part without commentary, are deeply moving both in and of themselves and in the context of the searching portrait of the man behind them.

To skip forward to the end: in the film's final segment Nathaniel Kahn tells Shulyar Wares, the Bangladeshi architect, that his three days of photographing the government building at Dhakka, Kahn's last great project, will only yield at most ten minutes of film. `Ten minutes!' Wares exclaims. `You would try to do justice to this building in ten minutes! To its spirit, its power, the ambiguities of its spaces!' Wares then speaks about Kahn's achievement and character. It's not unusual for a great artist to fall short as a man, he says: the one failure may be necessary for the other success. It's an eloquent, seemingly spontaneous speech, and a perfect finale to the portrait.

It's hard to do justice to this film without summarizing it scene by scene. It's the cumulative effect of the interviews, plus the fine photography and the brilliant editing, that all add up to an extraordinary portrait of a great artist and a flawed but complex man. Nathaniel Kahn's simple bravery before the camera leads to a series of intensely revealing, often moving scenes with the people in Kahn's life. There are quite searching conversations with the two other women, including the filmmaker's mother. Nathaniel Kahn never falters or spoils the tone: he isn't confrontational, but neither does he avoid hard questions. He's serious, but without an ounce of self-importance.

And while the interviews are powerful, they are paced by visits to the few but great buildings, whose effect at times is transcendent, and needs no inflated commentary from Nathaniel or anyone else.

It's astonishing how the film modulates from some rather petty remarks by men who worked with Lou in Fort Worth (who considered the architect impractical and airy-fairy) to the building that resulted, backed up by Beethoven's Ninth. If you can look at a building with Beethoven's Ninth as background and the music seems right, you know it's a great building. And this is the revelation of My Architect: that Louis Kahn's buildings are magnificent, radiant visions of serenity, vastness, and beauty: that they're among the artistic masterpieces of the twentieth century and we're fools not to go see them. I for one plan to make the pilgrimage to La Jolla for the Salk Center as soon as I can.

The triumph of Nathaniel Kahn's documentary is its balance. While the exploration of the buildings and the processes behind them goes along, so also the search for the secrets of Kahn's life continues through the course of the film. We realize that indeed as Wares says, Kahn's weaknesses and his virtues are inseparable. If he was a bit of a Don Juan, it's because he was a man of great personal charm, a man without poses or pretenses whom everyone liked - though sometimes they had to give up working with him to save their health and sanity, because he worked so relentlessly. Neither of the `other women' would have had it any other way. The first found working with him tremendously rewarding despite the painful secrecy (she was an architect too), and the second, the filmmaker's mother, still believes that Lou was about to come and live with them when he died. And if Kahn was irresponsible toward women, he was passionately committed to his work, and the result is a lasting monument of triumphant buildings.

There is a surprising amount of footage of Kahn himself, so that his face, his stature, even the way he looked walking in and out of his offices in Philadelphia, are always a reality to us. It's appropriate that Kahn died in the huge train station, his address mysteriously obliterated from his passport. He died as a nomad, exhausted from his great final project in Bangladesh, driven, isolated. Nathaniel even managed to find and interview - in California! - the railroad employee who found his father's body in Penn Station 25 years before. The whole film seems a combination of diligence and serendipity. It's a homage with equal measures of passion and restraint. Though a search for self in a way, it's selfless and compassionate.

What a tribute to his father! He set out on a quest to learn more about a man whom he knew little of, and by the end of the journey, I believe Nathaniel Kahn is content with what he learned and personally felt. The film is 5 years in the making, and a quarter of a century after his death, Louis I. Kahn's total commitment in his work - consistent strong desire to build buildings that are meaningful to humanity and timeless to the whole world, with insight into his life is proudly depicted by his son Nathaniel in the documentary "My Architect: A Son's Journey".

The film is by no means an anthology of Louis' work. There are plenty of books and archived materials that have records of Louis Kahn's projects and buildings. This documentary works like a mystery, writer-director and co-producer Nathaniel Kahn was searching for the man whom he briefly knew as his father.

The film is in chapters. In "Heading West," we're at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California. It's a sight worth beholding - Kahn's integral concept of building and environment, optimizing light for the scientists at work is amazing. From a former colleague who worked with 'Lou' 35 years ago, we hear about his meticulous attention to detail, also how 'rambunctious' he could be - certainly didn't mince words in his criticism. A memorable scene is when the camera pulled back wide and we see Nathaniel skating around at the plaza area of the Salk Institute - a tiny figure, like a child happily playing in the bowl of his father's hands.

The "Immigrant" segment brought us to meet Anne Tyng, the architect who collaboratively worked with 'Lou' and also bore him a daughter, Alex. Now at 80, Tyng's return with Nathaniel's film crew to the Bath House project at Trenton, New Jersey, was nostalgic. In "Go to sea," we get to see the Barge for American Wind Symphony Orchestra - all made of steel, and meeting Robert Boudreau, who was surprised by Nathaniel when he finally told him he's 'Lou's' son. Boudreau was touched, he said he had seen Nathaniel when he was six, with his Mom (Harriet Pattison), and he was not to tell anyone that Lou had a son. It was a 'chokingly' emotional moment of reunion.

Like his father "The Nomad," Nathaniel traveled to Jerusalem, and learned about the Synagogue project that his father began but not realized. He visited the wailing wall, and seeing his yarmulke kept falling off/being 'breezed off' his head gave me a sense that he need not be 'totally' Jewish to be his father's son. We continue with sitting down with his two half-sisters at the "Family Matters" segment. We also hear him conversing with his Mom at Maine, and from talking to previous office personnel at his father's office, we come to know how his father intensely worked and practically lived there, sleeping on a carpet on the office floor, weekends and all.

"The End of the Journey" brought us to Ahmedabad, India, to the Indian Institute of Management building. Talking with architect B.V. Doshe was a revelation. In the end, Nathaniel found a very much alive Louis Kahn, his father - his spirits live within him. This documentary is very much a tear-jerker for me. I was teary-eyed most of the time - it was very touching and am in awe of the man, the architect and his son, and the women in his life besides his famous works and buildings. Louis I. Kahn wanted to give his love to the 'whole world,' juggling work and three families (you might say he has three women in his life to keep his inspiration going). As Shamsul Wares, the architect at the Capital of Bangladesh complex (completed 9 years after 'Lou's' death) so poignantly noted: Louis Kahn has given the people of Bangladesh a lot, spending time at Bangladesh, understanding the culture of the place and people - as well as giving them democracy through what he has achieved, and for such a dedicated man, usually the people close to him he'd often miss seeing. It seems the price of being great comes with inevitable personal sacrifices.

This film reminds me of King Vidor's "The Fountainhead" 1949 (good dramatic story in B/W with music by Max Steiner), based on Ayn Rand's novel, with Gary Cooper as the uncompromising architect who stands by his own ideals, and Patricia Neal as the parallel supportive woman in his life.

When Nathaniel Kahn embarked into this voyage, he hardly knew who his father really was. By the end of the film, he found him and comes to terms with the strange life he lived as a child.

Louis Kahn was the father. He was an architect's architect. His designs were perhaps too complex, as he tried to create buildings that didn't conform with trends popular at that time. It is ironic that he never achieved the fame that came so easy to some of his contemporaries. He had a vision and he never strayed from it. We can see characteristics of his unique style in the buildings he left behind as a legacy to humanity. Every one of his creations are unique in that they don't imitate works from other architects.

Louis Kahn's life was rather complicated. He was married, yet he had affairs with two of his assistants that produced a girl and a boy, besides the legitimate daughter he had with his wife.

As a boy, Nathaniel Kahn's life was lived in a secluded area, away from his father, who only visited late at night. Louis Kahn never recognized these children, although it is very clear they all knew about the others existence.

It is tragic that Louis Kahn died alone in Grand Central Station when he was returning from a trip without making peace with the women and children he never acknowledged as his own by his side. He probably cared a great deal about all his children, but he remains an aloof figure throughout the film. We never get to know the man, although at the end, Nathaniel, in his quest to discover his father's life, finds most of the missing pieces of the puzzle.

This is a personal account on the life of an artist. Thanks to that son, who has the courage to tell the story, we are almost prying into the lives of Louis Kahn and his extended family.

Films are a unique way of imagining, somewhere between the unreal and what we call real. It really is quite a unique thing, more than a mere medium. I have always thought of film as the outer spheres of private literature grown into public architecture.

So it pains me when we have a bad film about architecture, or rather a film which features architecture but which has no real architecture in it. I've lamented before about films which supposedly feature math or music or religion or great philosophical ideas, and end up focusing on people, usually tortured people. The mathematics or whatever is acknowledged but not revealed and the tortured souls involved might as well be sportsmen.

That's a loss. But this is a greater loss, because with some skill film CAN convey architecture, in fact the special eye of the moving camera can reveal things about space that are unavailable to a single human in that space. The next frontier in architecture IS cinematic architecture, expanded form.

Kahn was indeed the man who invented postmodern architecture. Perhaps no person working in space understood space as well as he. This is quite apart from the ability to shape and manipulate space, something he did with only ordinary skill. So in his case it is not even enough to introduce us to buildings, but we have to go into the buildings in dimensions other than the space they enclose.

There are dozens of people alive who could have spoken to the matter, to have enlightened us. What we get is search by an undernourished child, some pictures of clouds as they pass over Kahn buildings, some spewing of irrelevant platitudes by lesser architects and finally a teary testament of inspiration from a thankful Bangli.

There's no architecture here.

Kahn's notions had nothing to do with "recreating ruins" and everything with revealing order, order in utility, in forms (usually classical forms), and order in light. How wonderful would it have been for the son to discover this and convey it to us. Who gives a bleep about how he relates to his half-sisters?

Whether you know it of not, Kahn changed the way you imagine. But there's a fascinating story that was missed here. Unmarried mother number one was Anne Tyng who was more than a mere draftswoman. for several decades she was the center of distributed collaboration in revealing the post-modern form of the new brick. As a young architect, I communicated with her on this and feel sure that she was a key influence in his late education.

I have since spent quality time with the fellow who actually did much of the design work while Kahn was jetting around speaking and am convinced that the insights were both more collaborative and profound than reflected here.

This is as far from actual architecture, actual notions of where we fit, than Mel Gibson's iconography has to do with Jesus.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.