I was present this evening, Dear Readers, at the Los Angeles premiere of a new documentary called My Architect. This film was created by Nathaniel Kahn, son of famous architect Louis Kahn.
There are three core elements to this film. It is subtitled "A Son's Journey," and the film documents Nathaniel's search to discover the father he really did not know by exploring his architecture and talking to the people who knew him.
In that process, the second core element, a survey of the elder Mr. Kahn's buildings, and a critical assessment of his work by his peers, is created. The younger Mr. Kahn was successful in filming interviews with the creme de la creme of the world of architecture from the latter half of the 20th century. We see and hear Mr. Philip Johnson, Mr. I. M. Pei, Mr. Robert A.M. Stern, Mr. Vin Scully, Mr. Moshe Kafdie and others share very frank (and sometimes hilarious) comments about Kahn's works and Kahn the man. We also gain insight from individuals who worked closely with Kahn in the creation of several of his masterpieces, and others intimately familiar with those buildings, all of whom speak eloquently about their soul. The buildings are beautifully photographed in this film.
The third element of the film focuses on the mystery of the man, Louis Kahn. He died of a heart attack in the men's room at Penn Station in New York in 1973. Because he had altered the passport he had with him, he lay unclaimed in the morgue for three days. His eerie demise serves as the catalyst of the real mystery that is explored in this film, as the elder Mr. Kahn had three separate families. He was married, and had a daughter with his wife. While married, he became involved with two other women, one by whom he had another daughter, and one by whom he had a son, Nathaniel, the maker of this film. The three families did not physically cross paths until Mr. Kahn's funeral. There is an almost surreal scene in the film of the three half siblings meeting to discuss their common father.
Mr. Kahn did not have the success that many of his peers enjoyed. His architecture was not universally accepted when it was created, and only as time passed has its importance become better recognized. Some of his greatest works include the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the capital complex in Bangladesh. One Kahn building with which I was unfamiliar until this evening is the library at Exeter College in Exeter, New Hampshire. From the outside, the building could be mistaken for one of the many industrial mill buildings that used to dot the New England landscape. The exterior does little to prepare one for the interior, the centerpiece of which is a huge atrium, with enormous circular cutouts that fill each of the atrium's four sides, exposing the several levels of the library. The effect is nothing short of stunning.
The film flows nicely and tells its three stories very well. It's a bit self-indulgent at times; I could have done with fewer reaction shots of the younger Mr. Kahn as he listens to his interviewees' comments. At times, I thought this story might have been better served in subjective written form, and adapted to the screen by an objective third party filmmaker. But in a sense, the younger Mr. Kahn was working against the clock. Many of the elder Mr. Kahn's peers are quite advanced in age, and any delay in getting a film made might have meant losing key commentators.
