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 worlds 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 in 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 rolling 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 some of the world’s most celebrated architects -- Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, and the late Philip Johnson among them.
In My Architect, the filmmaker reveals the haunting beauty of his father's monumental creations and takes us deep within his own divided family--a world of prejudice and intrigue, haunted by unspoken mythologies affecting both parents and children. In a documentary with the emotional impact of a dramatic feature film, Nathaniel Kahn's personal journey becomes a universal investigation of identity, a celebration of art and those who create it.
My Architect is a New Yorker Films release and shown by permission of New Yorker Films.
Discussants:
Donald Albrecht is an independent curator and author of Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies. He is Adjunct Professor at the Cooper-Hewitt Program in Decorative Arts and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Francis Levy is Co-Director of the Philoctetes Center. His humor, fiction, poetry and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice and The East Hampton Star.
Laurie J. Wilson is a psychoanalyst, art historian and art therapist. She is the author of Albert Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man.