To many of his colleagues, he was the greatest living American architect for at least 10 years. His Indian pals considered him a guru, a yogi. His two mistresses thought no less of him, but spent too many painful hours — years — away from his odd charm and invigorating ideas. To at least two of his children, he was a “fluke of a father.”
The mystery of Louis I. Kahn, a celebrated architect who died bankrupt and lay unidentified for three days in a New York City morgue, would have been a rich subject for any filmmaker. For son Nathaniel Kahn the contours of that mystery — the bare facts, the enticing myths, the speculation — were a stony path to self-revelation and reconciliation.
“My Architect,” playing exclusively at Landmark E Street Cinema, is a superb documentary, serious without being scholarly and with an occasional breeze of Neil Young and the Jefferson Airplane.
Note the sneaky double-edge of its title: “Lou,” as his narrator son calls him, never behaved like a father and doesn’t merit the term; he was a nocturnal houseguest, no more than once a week for 11 short years. And yet, it says that Louis Kahn shaped him in powerful, unavoidable ways, if not quite by the design of care and feeding.
Mr. Kahn, the architect, was born to Jewish parents in Osel, Estonia, in 1901, or maybe 1902; he was never certain. He grew up in industrial north Philadelphia and was drawn early to architecture. He would marry and stay married to Esther, deceased but presented here in an old interview, and have one official daughter, Sue Ann.
Nathaniel’s mother, Harriet Pattison, a landscape architect, was Mr. Kahn’s second long-term mistress. His first, Anne Tyng, was a colleague who helped Mr. Kahn design a bathhouse in Trenton, N.J., a pivotal design in his career. She birthed Alexandra, in secret, in Rome, the city where Mr. Kahn had found his late-blooming original voice as an artist.
Nathaniel speaks to all these living principals, seeking answers, retracing steps. He recalls the 1974 funeral and the indignities of not being invited, of having shown up anyway, only to be shooed into an anteroom.
He crisscrosses the country — Philadelphia; New Haven, Conn.; Ft. Worth, Texas; La Jolla, Calif. — to roam his father’s buildings and rap with contemporaries such as Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei. The Yale Art Gallery, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Kimbell Art Museum and other structures are appreciated, thankfully, from a lay perspective. What’s striking is their monumental oomph and geometricism. Nathaniel speculates that his father was after the look and feel of ancient ruins.
Mr. Kahn had his masterpieces, but there were numerous designs that never made it past the model stage. Edmund Bacon, a gruff pragmatist who clashed with Mr. Kahn in the late ’60s over plans for downtown Philadelphia, resurfaces to slam the architect all over again as a hopeless utopian. The tastelessness is jarring, but Nathaniel doesn’t flinch. (Not for a second is “My Architect” a parade of yes-men.)
Nathaniel’s open-ended trip takes him to Jerusalem, where one of those nixed designs is discussed. Nathaniel reckons that project — a synagogue that would have overlooked the Dome of the Rock — must’ve been especially galling to his father, a Jewish mystic.
The film winds up, literally and thematically, in Dhaka, home of Mr. Kahn’s crowning design of the Bangladeshi capital complex. Nathaniel takes it in from afar and from the heart of its Parliament chamber.
At least the six nights he didn’t see his father were spent on great things, right? Does that make up for the guy’s personal shabbiness? Is neglect an inevitability of human genius?
How would you like to have been on the receiving end of those questions?
***1/2
TITLE: “My Architect”
RATING: NR (Brief profanity)
CREDITS: Written and directed by Nathaniel Kahn. Produced by Susan Rose Behr and Mr. Kahn. Cinematography by Bob Richman. Music by Joseph Vitarelli.
RUNNING TIME: 116 minutes.
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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