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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MY ARCHITECT
Accessible and compelling - feeling at times more like a feature film than a documentary
- Nathaniel Kahn's beautifully moving My Architect takes you on an emotional
journey in search of his father. Nathaniel is the illegitimate son of the complex and enigmatic
architect Louis Kahn, who in 1974 died bankrupt in a men's room in Pennsylvania Station
(ironically one of the world's least inspired buildings) and was considered by many
scholars to be one of the most important architects of the 20th
century. Nathaniel sets out to sort out man and myth and eventually to reconcile a past
with a father who led many lives. Merely a fleeting presence in his son's
life and dead at the age of 73 (when his son was only 11), Kahn's obituary in The New
York Times listed only his wife Esther and daughter Sue Ann as survivors. But the
architect had two other children, both by women with whom he worked. (All three
families actually lived within a few miles of one another, but never met until the
architect's funeral.) Included throughout are interviews with Nathaniel's colorful extended family. His odyssey takes him to his father's buildings of
ordinary brick and concrete that capture the grandeur of ancient structures. At the
fortress-like turrets of the Capitol Complex in Bangladesh, a young boy stands alone before
its spiritual power, with its massive structure reflected in the placid water surrounding the
building like a moat. In that bittersweet moment, one can viscerally feel the emotional longing of Nathaniel, awed by a father who created
such majestic beauty and yet who was unable to give of himself to his own son. Tom Titone, Actor/Playwright
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