My Architect

'My Architect: A Son's Journey'

Movies today rarely touch chords that are spiritual or deeply emotional, but Nathaniel Kahn's remarkable documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey does both. This powerful film, one of the five nominees for this year's Oscar in the Best Documentary category (and probably the favourite), is a portrait of Kahn's father, the famed architectural visionary Louis Kahn, who fathered his only son out of wedlock and never publicly recognized him.

Done with amazing emotional balance and openness, Nathaniel's film becomes a quiet, inspiring study of the vagaries of genius, the blindness of commerce, the pain of family conflicts and the almost sublime power of great architecture or great art.

At the end of "My Architect," Indian architect Shamsul Wares gives a poignant elegy on the site of Louis' supreme posthumous achievement, the National Assembly building and capital of Bangladesh - and I was overwhelmed. You may be, too, as Wares' speech becomes increasingly filled with awe and sorrow for the magnitude of Kahn's works and the sadness, sins and deep frustrations of his life.

Nathaniel frames his film as a detective story, with himself as sleuth/narrator, gathering information, interviewing witnesses and photographing the grand edifices and complexes designed by the father he knew so little. What he learns during his "Son's Journey" is troubling, ambiguous, glorious and tawdry - and still a mystery until almost the end of the road.

Louis, one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, was someone whom the young Nathaniel adored: a wizened, ugly little man with a burn-scarred face and magnetic personality who infrequently visited Nathaniel and his mother. But he was also a riddle. In his troubled, work-obsessed life, Louis had fathered three separate families, though only one officially, with his lifelong wife Esther. When Louis died at age 68, Nathaniel was only 11. Now in middle age, the son decides to investigate, undertaking a voyage filled with beautiful, impressive, sometimes overpowering sights (Kahn's Jonas Salk Institute and Kimbell Art Museum) and withering emotional crises.

Louis Kahn, Nathaniel learns, was a phenomenon. According to his colleague I.M. Pei, he was one of the most admired architects of the last century - and according to colleague Philip Johnson, the most loved, above Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe. But, as the child of a poor Estonian Jewish family, Louis rose with difficulty and was never fully appreciated until the last 10 years of his life. He died, alone and bankrupt, in Penn Station, his name mysteriously crossed off his passport, on his way back from a foreign commission he never lived to complete.

That was the Bangladesh capital, only one of many designs Louis never lived to see, or which were rejected or abandoned. Lacking business sense, Louis rarely made the money his stature warranted. Socially blunt, he incurred the enmity of the power elite in his own city, Philadelphia, whose nabobs rejected his radical plans for rebuilding their downtown in the '60s. (One of them, the insufferably smug Edmund Bacon, appears here, pathetically, to revile Louis once again to his son.)

Hanging over all was the shadow of Louis' secret scandal, the three families who finally crossed paths only at his funeral: his lover and colleague Harriet and son Nathaniel; another lover/colleague, Anne, and their illegitimate daughter Alexandra Tyng; and wife Esther and daughter Sue Ann. Circumstances and Esther kept them all apart. But years later, the three children sit down amicably together for Nathaniel's camera - a family, however briefly, at last.

Was Louis a cad? An overreacher? Or, as one of his friends suggests, an overgrown child unable to take control of his personal life? The movie keeps revealing real anguish, but softly, subtly. Nathaniel never indulges in bathos, keeping a sense of detachment and discreet control - and this allows him to gain a deep appreciation of his father's good and bad points and to resolve his own doubts.

At the end, as the vast stone walls, windows and corridors of the Bangladesh capital (constructed, amazingly, by hand labour over 23 years) tower like some stunning science-fiction monument over the bare Dhaka plains, and as Wares speaks passion-ately about the genius who envisioned them, you feel simultaneously the joy of lasting art and the painful transience of life. Few scenes in any recent film are as moving as Wares' testimony and the surrounding awesome views of Kahn's masterpiece. Even if you know nothing of architecture or Louis Kahn, that climax will bring you as close to them both as a father's touch, a mother's loss, a son's tears.

We are living during a renaissance, possibly even a golden age, of the movie documentary and Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, five years in the making, is likely to be regarded as one of its peaks. A deeply personal film of great intelligence and controlled emotional power with some of the qualities of a thriller, it brings to mind Citizen Kane and JR Ackerley's My Father and Myself.

The film begins with the mysterious death of Louis I Kahn, one of the great architects of the twentieth century, in 1974. He died in a lavatory at New York's Penn Station of a heart attack at the age of 73 on his way home from India, where one of his greatest projects, the Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, was nearing completion. For some reason, the address in his passport had been obliterated, and so, despite his eminence, his body went unclaimed for four days. He was also bankrupt, his small Philadelphia practice being $500,000 in debt.

His son, Nathaniel is not mentioned in the New York Times obituary, which merely refers to a daughter, Sue Anne. In fact, though Louis remained with the woman he married in 1929, and who had supported him in hard times during the Thirties and Forties, he had two other households, all within three or four miles of each other in Philadelphia. There was a child in both, their mothers being architects who worked at different times for Kahn's firm. The second of these was Nathaniel's mother, Harriet Patterson, a specialist in landscaping.

Nathaniel grew up in the shadow of Louis, who had been a loving, playful father on his weekly visits to Harriet. As an undergraduate at Yale, he passed every day two of his father's major buildings - the Yale Art Gallery (1951-53), Kahn's first major commission, and the Yale Centre for British Art (1969-74), one of his last. His film is the way Citizen Kane might have been if, instead of the anonymous reporter Thompson, Charles Foster Kane's son was searching for his father. What is it that shaped this man, born in Estonia in 1901 to Jewish parents who brought him to Philadelphia at the age of four? He could have been an artist or a musician (as a child, he helped support the impoverished household by selling drawings to newspapers and playing the piano in the cinema), but he chose architecture. It wasn't, however, until the 1950s that his career began to take off after a sojourn in Italy that allowed him to study the antiquities of Rome, Greece and Egypt, giving him a feeling for the timeless, the monumental.

Kahn was a short, dapper figure, who always wore bowties and brushed his hair forwards to cover his baldness. According to his wife, the only things he owned were books and ties. He was a hard man to work with, driving and driven and though ambitious for fame, as one witness asserts, he did nothing to ingratiate himself with clients. Was it intransigence that kept him from participating in the recreation of Philadelphia, as the head of the project still angrily claims, or because of that city's conservatism and anti-semitism? Philip Johnson recalls him as altogether more endearing than Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe and regarded him as a true artist. Frank Gehry says: 'My work came out of my reverence for him.' IM Pei says Kahn was tactless with patrons: 'I'm more patient, being Chinese,' he says with a smile, and, pressed on the comparison between his worldly success and Kahn's seeming failure, he says quality is more important than quantity. Indeed, the relatively few Kahn projects that achieved fulfilment were fully realised to his high standards.

My Architect is the engrossing story of several journeys - Nathaniel's in search of his father and of himself and Louis's nomadic quest in search of a vision. These are spiritual and physical journeys, external and internal, paralleled strikingly by the extraordinary difference between the often austere exteriors of Kahn's brick and concrete buildings and their light, warm, quirky, expansive interiors.

There is little in the way of formal analysis and no architectural historians opining, but a lot of the film's force and artistry, as with Citizen Kane , resides in the dramatic way in which conversations are recorded in and around Kahn's buildings. Nathaniel, for instance, meets his two half-sisters in one of the rare private houses Kahn designed and the climax of the picture comes when he visits his father's last and greatest building, the breathtaking Capital Complex in Dhaka. There a Bangladeshi architect speaks movingly of how Kahn had presented 'the poorest country in the world' with an edifice that 'gives us the chance of democracy'. Walking through the Salk Foundation for Biological Sciences overlooking the Pacific at La Jolla, a former associate casually remarks that perhaps Kahn's face, badly scarred from a childhood accident, gave him a particular feeling for surfaces, and the camera pans over the rough stone of the building. This man is also asked whether he drank with Kahn. 'Yeah,' he replies. 'You should speak to my first wife about that.'

If the Dhaka complex is Kahn's major achievement, the most remarkable of those left unrealised is the synagogue in Jerusalem that Louis worked on in collaboration with the city's celebrated mayor, Teddy Kollek, who, in his nineties, makes an unforgettable contribution to the film. Nathaniel's journey to Israel is one of the most illuminating sequences in the film and, typically, the solemnity of a visit to the Wailing Wall is undercut by the wind that keeps blowing off the paper yarmulke he's compelled to wear. My Architect is a warm, richly suggestive, deeply humane film that offers no glib answers to the questions it raises, and leaves us thinking about Kahn, destiny and the endless complexity of life.

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