My Architect (2003)

Original title

My Architect: A Son's Journey

Directed by

Nathaniel Kahn

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 56m

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 32 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A son makes a documentary about his famous architect father, Louis Kahn. He visits the buildings his father designed and talks to people who knew him. The film looks at both the architect's great career and his complicated family life.

introspectivepersonalcontemplativeadmiringbittersweetreverentslow-pacedmeditative

What happens

My Architect: A Son's Journey is a 2003 documentary film about the American architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974), by his son Nathaniel Kahn, detailing the architect's extraordinary career and his familial legacy after his death in 1974. In the film, Louis Kahn is quoted as saying “When I went to high school I had a teacher, in the arts, who was head of the department of Central High, William Grey, and he gave a course in Architecture, the only course in any high school I am sure, in Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Egyptian, and Gothic Architecture, and at that point two of my colleagues and myself realized that only Architecture was to be my life. How accidental are our existences are really, and how full of influence by circumstance.” The film features interviews with renowned architects, including B. V. Doshi, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Edmund Bacon (architect), Shamsul Wares, I.M. Pei, Moshe Safdie and Anne Tyng. Throughout the film, Kahn visits all of his father's buildings including The Yale Center for British Art, The Salk Institute, Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. The film explores Kahn's family life which involved his fathering children by three different partners, each of whom was kept in the dark about the existence of his other families. Reviewing the film in Chicago Reader, David Schwartz wrote: "This absorbing, beautiful documentary is the first-person odyssey of Nathaniel Kahn, son of legendary architect Louis Kahn by one of his longtime mistresses. Despite his accomplishments, Kahn Sr. died a penniless loner in Penn Station in 1974, leaving behind three families, none of them aware of the others' existence. Seeking to unravel his father's mysterious personal life, Nathaniel combines rare personal footage and compelling interviews with the elder Kahn's colleagues, friends, and families." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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