My Architect

Nominated for best documentary feature at 2004's Academy Awards, My Architect follows filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn in his quest to find out about his father, the legendary architect Louis I Kahn. Lou Kahn died in 1974, when Nate was 11 years old, leaving behind an incredible but limited body of work, unpaid debts and three separate families all living within a few kilometres of each other.

My Architect follows Kahn's life through chronologically examining his buildings, and interspersing their beauty with the story of a charismatic, but selfish and emotionally immature genius. As the son which Lou never publicly acknowledged during his lifetime, Nate has delicately placed himself in the story without overpowering the main focus.

When examining the magnificent Salk Institute in California, Nate evokes his father's mythic use of space and light in his buildings, making it a peaceful and fascinating experience for viewers. The shot of Nate rollerblading in Salk's smoky white central meeting place emphasises the building's harmony with nature. It's breathtaking. My Architect also covers the difficulty Louis Kahn had with getting his designs accepted. Several fantastical buildings exist only on paper, dismissed by more practical architects and property developers. It wasn't until Louis Kahn went to the East that his visions were enthusiastically embraced. In India, where he built the Indian

Institute of Management, a former co-worker describes him as a guru. In Bhangladesh, where he built the magnificent National Assembly Building, citizens consider him a father of democracy.

Watching My Architect is a wonderful way to begin or continue learning about architecture and the importance of space. But it's the irony of Lou Kahn's egotism combined with the transcendence of his work that will inspire you. 4 stars.

My impression, having seen this documentary, is that Nathaniel Kahn ended up with more questions than he had before he made the film.

He took five years to make it, a labour of love and longing. I can only imagine the turmoil of the editing process, what to leave in, what to take out.

His father, the renowned architect Louis Kahn,comes across as a man too selfish and self-absorbed to be emotionally available to even one wife not alone three. But like many men of his character, he attracted women who were spellbound by the remoteness and entranced by the creativity.

One of his mistresses said he was "accessible" but that is never explored. Other comments by people who knew him well suffer the same fate. A pity.

The tension between the three half-siblings in the room of a home Louis designed is also palpable. The unsaid hovers over the conversation. The only tracks that his father left were in the buildings he left behind, some great, some not so great.

I was captivated by the music ship and the Salk Institute. Saddened by the baby mothers who got caught forever by his callous impregnations never more exemplified than what he said to the director's mother upon being told of her pregnancy - "not again!"

8 out of 10, beautifully filmed, genuine.

It appears, in this case at least, the son is not the father of the man.

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.

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.

I saw this movie 4 times within the course of 2 weeks, and could probably have seen it 4 more times without losing interest.

To me the movie is 3 things: a story about a son's search for information about and connection with his father; the father's story, both personal and as an architect; and an homage to the father's architecture. I find the movie very rich on all accounts.

I found the son's search very moving and one I immediately connected to emotionally. The father's story is very interesting--a lot of mystery but also a lot of information, including film of the father which greatly enriches the story. And the architecture is quite wonderful and presented in a very moving way.

The movie is full of interviews, many quite wise and spiritual. A few folks present "the other side of the coin," so we get a good picture of the contradictions of Louis Kahn, his family and colleagues.

The editing and pace of the film drew me in and kept me engrossed throughout. Especially wonderful was the music.

For me this movie is like going to a concert, a museum and a spiritual event all at the same time, as well as seeing an engrossing story. A wonderful experience!