My Architect: A Son's Journey

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn

Starring Louis Kahn, Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson and Moshe Safdie

Classification: PG

Rating: ***

Five years in the making, and currently nominated for an Oscar, My Architect: A Son's Story is a twofold story of heroic achievements and personal failings. Both stories are about the architect Louis Kahn, a major figure in modern architecture and, as we discover, a lousy dad.

On one side we have a bracing educational film, with archival footage from the Museum of Modern Art and testimonies from some of the great monument-builders of our time (Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson and Moshe Safdie). These segments make you wish there were more films that spoke so openly and intelligently about contemporary architecture. On the other side we have a personal diary film brimming with grievance, about unhappy families, spurned lovers and abandoned children.

Louis Kahn was an Estonian-born Jew, whose face was badly scarred in a childhood accident with fire before his family moved to America. He fell in love with architecture in high school but it was not until his 50s and a stint in Rome, where he was moved by the monumentality and spirituality of ancient ruins, that he embarked on a handful of generally acknowledged masterpieces. These included the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Tex., and the capitol building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He also designed numerous other buildings that were never built, and ended up in considerable debt.

In 1974, at the age of 73, after returning from a trip to India, he was found dead from a heart attack in the men's washroom in New York's Penn Station. His body lay unclaimed for days because, unaccountably, he had crossed out the address on his passport.

The significance of that crossed-out address goes directly to the more personal story. Though married only once, Philadelphia-based Kahn had children with two other women, including the mother of filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, his youngest child.

Nathaniel was 11 when his father died, and his mother, a landscape architect who worked in Kahn's office, contended that the changed passport indicated he was about to leave his wife and move in with her. Both Nathaniel and his two half-sisters attended the funeral (despite the widow's wishes) but were whisked away shortly afterward. Nathaniel remembers his father as a man he saw once a week.

The polished outside story of Kahn's life, as an architect obsessed with weight, light and harmony, contrasts with the personal one, which is messy, secretive and repetitious. Nathaniel argues with his elderly mother on camera. He takes his two half-sisters to a beautiful house in the woods that their father designed, and one of the women wonders why he never built such a home for his own family.

The "journey" of the title is Nathaniel's quest to create a portrait of his father. It takes him to New Haven, Conn., to California, Texas, New Jersey, Jerusalem and finally to Bangladesh. We meet the three attractive, articulate women in his father's life -- his collaborator and lover, Anne Tyng, now 80; Nathaniel's mother, Harriet Pattison, from an East Coast upper-middle-class WASP family; and Esther, Louis's wife, who is seen only in an old television interview.

We also meet his secretary who juggled his triple life, a drinking buddy, a cab driver who remembers Kahn's reputation as a ladies' man. We also meet a man who commissioned Kahn to build a futuristic "symphony boat" that stops at harbours around the world and expands into a concert stage.

Among the best interviews is one with Edmund Bacon, a famed Philadelphia town planner who rebuilt the city's downtown in the sixties. Now in his 90s, Bacon still shakes with rage as he recalls his battles with Kahn over the project. He fired the architect because "the purity of my conception was being encrusted by Lou's fantasies."

Then there's the good ol' boy construction engineer who laughingly describes how he tore up Kahn's revisions to the Kimbell Art Museum, and compares the architect's tireless attention to detail to the perseverance of "the energizer bunny."

Meeting this engaging, emotional, articulate cast of characters who surrounded Louis Kahn, the viewer can't help but enjoy his passion and folly. By comparison, Nathaniel -- and his sometimes petulant resentment, especially as we see it directed at his mother -- becomes irksome. Some maladroit musical choices (Neil Young's Long May You Run played twice) don't help.

At the film's conclusion, a tearful Bangladeshi architect, Shamsul Wares, pleads with Nathaniel to forgive his father for his personal flaws because of the great love he showed in building his masterpiece, Dhaka's capitol building. It would seem more sensible to come to terms with the bad father and admire the great architect.

For the audience, the fascination of a figure such as Louis Kahn is that his contradictions are irreducible. A physically ugly ladies' man, a perfectionist whose life was chaotic, a mystic full of earthly weaknesses, he was an original. The glory of the film is that it brings him to life again.