Besides visiting great Kahn buildings ?The Kimbell Art Museum and the Salk Institute among others ?he interviews many Lou Kahn contemporaries: I.M. Pei, Vincent Sculley, Robert A. Stern, and several former Kahn employees. These professionals paint a picture of a genius who was a workaholic and perfectionist. They speak briefly of what makes Kahn buildings great: the forms, the light, and his understanding of materials.
For a lay viewer, the film is a good introduction to Kahn's buildings. But the documentary is primarily personal. Kahn's unusual private life is more often the subject of the interviews than the work itself. For architects already familiar with Kahn's oeuvre, the film may add little insight.
The filmmaker repeatedly misses opportunities to showcase the buildings, focusing on interviewees instead of architecture. One frustrating moment comes near the end, when young Kahn speaks with Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares about the Capital Complex in Dhaka.
When told that the building's segment would represent only about ten minutes of the entire film, Wares exclaims, "You cannot treat this building like this! Do you think you can really capture the quality of this building in terms of space, light, volumes, and the layering of these spaces, the ambiguities?"
Even after that admonishment, too many more of the precious ten minutes are used up in head shots. Still, for the closing scene of the documentary, viewers are left with the passionate words of Wares: "From nothing, only paddy-fields, [Lou Kahn] gave us his greatest work. Here, in the poorest country in the world, he gave us an institution for democracy."
This is a poignant story of a search for an architect. But while unveiling the private man, it hardly does justice to the buildings that make him great.
Film review: My Architect by Nathaniel Kahn, 2003.
"My Architect" is a tale of a son in search of his father ?and in search of the private Louis I. Kahn. The two-hour documentary takes us to various built works of the famous American architect, from the Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia to the Capital Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
At Richards, one of Kahn's early projects, we hear some complaints from current occupants about problems attributable to the architect's inexperience. At Dhaka, we hear the deepest reverence for the man who, at the end of his career, sacrificed his personal and economic well being to build an extraordinary embodiment of nationhood in light and form for the people of Bangladesh.
The filmmaker, Nathaniel Kahn, was 11 years old when his famous father died in 1974. His mother, Harriet Pattison, whom the elder Kahn never married, was a landscape architect in the Kahn office. The boy and his mother were one of three families with whom Lou Kahn shared his meager social time during the last decade of his life. To understand this social dynamic and to come to know one of the greatest architects of the mid-20th century, the younger Kahn embarked on a filmic journey of discovery. >>>
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