Anyone with any connection to architecture in the latter half of the last century knows of Louis I. Kahn: genius and creator of some of the best-known and most-admired buildings of the time and beloved professor of architecture at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He talked to bricks, and they answered him truly. An Estonian immigrant whose face and hands had been scarred by a burning coal when he was a child, he emigrated to America at the age of three, and grew up to be the husband of Esther and the father of Sue Ann. Most also know that he died on a return trip from India, alone in New York’s Penn Station men’s room in 1974, and that his body lay unclaimed for days. Most don’t know that Kahn had crossed out the address on his passport, making identification difficult. Why?

The unsolved mystery proved a minor adjunct to the larger mysteries of Kahn’s life. He had three families in Philadelphia: besides Esther and Sue Ann, there were Anne Tyng, FAIA, and their daughter, Alexandra Tyng, and Harriet Pattison and their son, Nathaniel, who was 11 when his dad passed away. The three families, all of whom lived within a radius of a few miles, met for the first time at Louis Kahn’s funeral.

Nathaniel Kahn recalls his famous father from his once-a-week visits to their home as well as Nathaniel’s visits to his dad’s office, where his mother was employed. For a quarter of a century, Nathaniel lived with fond memories of his dad’s great stories of “silly boats” (they handmade a little book about them together) and of faraway places, like India. Then Nathaniel needed more: A filmmaker by profession, he set out on a five-year odyssey to find the father he barely knew. He did it through Louis Kahn’s architecture and the people who understood it—and him—best. The resulting two-hour movie, My Architect: A Son’s Journey, is nothing short of spellbinding.

Cast of characters
Nathaniel’s players are a contemporary architecture’s Who’s Who, from the ever-gracious I. M. Pei to nonagenarian King of Urban Renewal Edmund Bacon, yelling on a Philadelphia street corner in all his cantankerous glory. While Pei gently tells Nathaniel, “Three or four masterpieces are better than 50 or 60 buildings,” Bacon loudly insists that Kahn pere never really understood what the overall remake of Philadelphia in the ’60s was about, and that Kahn fils is just as dense. Cameos by Philip Johnson, FAIA; Robert A.M Stern, FAIA; and Frank Gehry, FAIA, add facets to Louis Kahn the Architect, the Genius, the True Artist. A walk through the desert in Israel with Moshe Safdie, FAIA, adds incredible depth to the understanding of Louis Kahn as “the nomad,” which indeed is the name of that particular sequence of the film.

Two other architects, the mothers of Kahn’s two younger children, bring important understanding to the film: Anne Tyng, FAIA, and landscape architect Harriet Pattison, Nathaniel’s mother. That they both became architects when women architects still were a rarity speaks immediately to their courage; ditto their single motherhoods. That each worked with Louis Kahn when they were romantically involved with him speaks of the intermingling love for the man, the architect, and the architecture. Both Tyng and Pattison wanted different endings for their love stories, yet both still speak about Kahn without bitterness.

While he could justify becoming angry, bitter, or permanently “wounded,” Nathaniel also stays the course of his journey and transcends the hurt of his largely absent father. He seasons his tale with interviews of non-architects, bringing the level on which we see Louis a little closer to earth. He talks to cab drivers who remember shuttling his father from family to family and around his beloved Philadelphia. Talks with a pair of rabbis and with his garrulous and WASPy aunts tell some of the anti-Semitism his father must have encountered with Mainline Philadelphia. And, in a heart-sinking moment, Nathaniel’s face crashes—quietly—when a compadre who worked on the Salk Institute casually mentions that Lou happily spent Christmas at his house with his kids. Nathaniel digests this while rollerblading the length of the Institute’s famed and solemn courtyard, skipping across the iconic central water element with a little more deliberation than necessary. Yet in the end, he embraces all that his father was.

The real stars of the film are Louis Kahn’s buildings, filmed in sequence by someone who has come to know intimately and love the powers of stone and space and light. Interspersed with the interviews, they start with the Yale Art Gallery, Trenton Bathhouse (which Lou developed with Tyng), and the Richards Medical Towers. They segue to a Modern building Who’s Who: the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Exeter Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Kimbell Art Museum, each more masterful, each more honed to the architect’s quest for timeless architecture. Were My Architect solely a retrospective of Louis Kahn’s work, it could stand on its own merit as a building documentary.

Redemption
The film is infinitely richer, though, for its layers of people stories. Although we can rate and debate Louis Kahn the Architect’s oeuvre until the sacred cows come home, judgment on Louis Kahn the Father remains the province of Nathaniel and his sisters. It is hard to imagine, however, any architectural heart not lightened by knowing that in the end Lou is graced with Nathaniel’s acceptance through understanding of his buildings. Understanding builds as Nathaniel travels through the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (1962–1974) and speaks with internationally honored architect and teacher B.V. Doshi, who worked with his father.

Understanding culminates at the Capital Complex at Dhaka (1962–1983), Bangladesh, where native son Shamsul Wares with quiet passion explains to Nathaniel how Louis, in creating this timeless masterpiece, gave democracy to Bangladeshis as their government was being born. In the backdrop as silent witness, light pours through massive concrete cutouts; acceptance dawns with the light. It was here, not in Philadelphia, that Kahn found his own freedom to build on the scale of which he previously had only dreamed.

Nathaniel’s film offers a multi-level love story. His search and subsequent acceptance of life’s slings and arrows tell a tale of love of self and one of filial respect beyond the required baseline. Anne Tyng and Harriet Pattison, great adventurers of their time, both lived a romantic alchemy of love for work and genius that perhaps evokes love of creation. And, not least, Nathaniel Kahn proves that filmmakers as well as architects can wield as a tool the love of space and light—timeless and beautifully documented in this extraordinary journey.

—SS

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