My Architect
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DVD details
Actor: B.V. Doshi, Edmund Bacon, Edwina Pattison Daniels, Frank O. Gehry, Philip JohnsonDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 116 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-02-15
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker
DVD Reviews of My Architect
DVD Review: A moving recounting of a song attempting to reconnect with his father
Summary: 5 Stars
For the five years that I was in grad school at Yale I went almost every week to the Yale Center for British Art, which was the last design of Louis Kahn's to be built (the National Assembly in Dacca was completed after Kahn's death but was designed earlier). It was difficult to see the building's exterior with any kind of scope, since other buildings surrounded it. But I have rarely loved a building so much on the inside. After entering the building you would ascend to the first floor through the monolith shown in the film (actually the casing of a spiral staircase) to confront two massive George Stubbs's canvasses. That initial space was magical, not just because of the two extraordinary paintings, but because of the space and the way it welcomed so much light into it. I used to love to go up to the section where the Turner's and Constable's were kept and lean on the railing and gaze about.
So, I approached this film as someone who felt a debt of gratitude to Kahn like I've felt to no other architect except Louis Sullivan (for reasons I won't delve into here). I felt that I had been a direct recipient of his largesse, so I was very interest to hear of Nathaniel Kahn's attempt to reconnect to his father. I actually knew next to nothing of Kahn's life when I saw this film. I knew of several of his buildings, including the National Assembly in Dacca, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and the Salk Institute, but I knew nothing of Kahn himself except that he died under bizarre circumstances and that he was an immigrant.
The details of Kahn's life were quite astonishing. The short version is that although he was married to the same woman for most of his adult life, he had children by two other women and maintained at least some connection to those children. Though not a bigamist, he clearly maintained three families. Nathaniel, the maker of the film, was his youngest child, and was eleven when Kahn's body was identified three days after being found dead in a bathroom in Grand Central Station in New York. He was found to be a half million dollars in debt, so he was in effect bankrupt. His architectural firm build a surprisingly small number of buildings, but as I. M. Pei noted in the film, what he lacked in quantity he made up for in quality, building a number of indisputable masterpieces.
Nathaniel's yearning to connect with his father and to come to some kind of understanding of who he was and why he lived his life the way he did dominate the film. Because he attempts to discover his father through his architecture, we get to know both Louis Kahn the artist as well as the man. I was amazed at how much casual film footage there was of Kahn, film of him simply walking down a sidewalk with his coat flung casually over his shoulder, film of him doing utterly mundane and everyday things. What emerges as Nathaniel interviews many of Kahn's former colleagues, friends, and lovers was a portrait of a man who was uncompromising (probably the source of his lack of success at attracting a large number of commissions), charismatic, likable, and a bit of a bastard. He seems every inch the lovable rogue. And also very much an enigma. For instance, although a few knew that Nathaniel was Kahn's son, and although he certainly spent a fair amount of time visiting Nathaniel, many people close to Kahn did not know he had a son. At one point in the film a relative of Kahn upon hearing that a man alleging to be Kahn's son was making a documentary of him, declared that Kahn had no son. Nathaniel calls him and they meet and talk and he is clearly accepted as Louis's son, but it is strange that a couple of decades after Kahn's death they unaware of Nathaniel's existence.
This is a film that is equally enjoyable as a study of the work of a truly great architect and as one man's search for father and family. For me the most touching moment in the film may have been when the three children of Louis Kahn (by three different women) meet in a home he designed and discuss what it means to be a family. They seem to agree that a family occurs when people decide to be family. These three seem to affirm a bond between them created by a most perplexing father.
Description of My Architect
A riveting tale of love, art, betrayal and forgiveness -- in which the illegitimate son of a legendary architect undertakes a worldwide exploration to discover and understand his father's and the personal choices he made.Louis I. Kahn is considered by many historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century. While Kahn's artistic legacy was a search for truth and clarity, his personal life was secretive and chaotic. His mysterious death in a train station men's room left behind three families -- one with his wife and two with women with whom he had long-term affairs. The child of one of these extra-marital relationships, Kahn's only son Nathaniel, sets out on a journey to reconcile the life and work of this mysterious man.
Revealing the haunting beauty of his father's monumental creations and taking us to the rarified heights of the world's celebrated architects and deep within his own divided family, Nathaniel's personal journey becomes a universal investigation of identity, a celebration of art and ultimately, of life itself.
One nonfiction film that truly creates a narrative journey, My Architect is filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn's engrossing search for his father. Louis Kahn, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, died in 1974 and left behind a highly compartmentalized life, including two children born out of wedlock to two mistresses. Nathaniel interviews the members of this somewhat puzzled family, but his deepest experiences are visits to the buildings that his father made (such as the grand Salk Institute in La Jolla, California), culminating in an emotional trip to Bangladesh. Here, Louis Kahn designed a massive government complex, a soaring achievement (and fascinating paradox--a Muslim capital designed by a Jewish man). This film asks: where does an artist truly live? In his life, or in the work he leaves behind? Nathaniel Kahn takes an amazingly even-tempered approach to this, given his personal stake in the story, and the result is a uniquely stirring movie. --Robert Horton
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