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
(25 votes)
2.
My Architect is a tale of love and art, betrayal and forgiveness -- in which the illegitimate son of a legendary artist undertakes a five year, worldwide exploration to understand his long-dead father.
Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, is considered by many architectural historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century. A Jewish immigrant who overcame poverty and the effects of a devastating childhood accident, Kahn created a handful of intensely powerful and spiritual buildings -- geometric compositions of brick, concrete and light -- which, in the words of one critic, "change your life."
While Kahn's artistic legacy was an uncompromising search for truth and clarity, his personal life was filled with secrets and chaos: He died, bankrupt and unidentified, in the men's room in Penn Station, New York, leaving behind three families -- one with his wife of many years and two with women with whom he'd had long-term affairs. In My Architect, the child of one of these extra-marital relationships, Kahn's only son Nathaniel, sets out on an epic journey to reconcile the life and work of this mysterious, contradictory man.
The riveting narrative leads us from the subterranean corridors of Penn Station to the roiling streets of Bangladesh (where Kahn built the astonishing Capital), and from the coast of New England to the inner sanctums of Jerusalem politics. Along the way, we encounter a series of characters that are by turns fascinating, hilarious, adoring and critical: from the cabbies who drove Kahn around his native Philadelphia, to former lovers and clients, to the rarified heights of the world's most celebrated architects -- Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson among them.
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