MY ARCHITECT Rating: (out of 5 stars) Director: Nathaniel Kahn Producers: Susan Rose Behr, Nathaniel Kahn Director of Photography: Bob Richman Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew

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Review by: Warren Curry
1/19/04

The subject of the documentary My Architect is Louis I. Kahn, one of the more influential architects of the latter half of the 20th Century, who died bankrupt and unidentified in a New York train station in 1974. Kahn also happens to be the father of the documentary's director, Nathaniel Kahn, whose mother was one of two of Louis' mistresses. My Architect is Nathaniel's attempt to find out who his mysterious father really was.

Nathaniel Kahn uses a series of talking heads interviews with many of his father's professional contemporaries -- I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry -- and dutifully shows us an abundance of the brilliant man's magnificent creations to lay the foundation for Louis Kahn the architect. There's no questioning the importance of Kahn's contributions to architecture, and as we learn more about his almost impossible to grasp life, it becomes clear that this enigmatic life fraught with contradictions simply defies complete understanding.

Of course, if Nathaniel Kahn had felt the same way early on, this film wouldn't exist (or it would be a short), so we watch the filmmaker's journey. Kahn was able to unearth quite a bit of stock footage of his father -- a peculiar looking person whose face was harshly marked by scars; the result of a severe burn suffered as a child -- and the director uses it to the documentary's advantage. Louis Kahn immigrated to Philadelphia from Estonia when he was only four years of age, and began his rise to professional prominence in the 1950s when he was already over 50 years old. His most accomplished work, arguably, is the Capitol Complex in Dhaka Bangladesh, a structure that was not completed until after Kahn's death. When Nathaniel informs a man he is interviewing in the Complex that the building will only receive 10 minutes of screen time, the interviewee scoffs at the film's worth.

The premise of My Architect is quite intriguing, and that intrigue carries the film through a series of redundant sequences. This film relies pretty heavily on its interview footage, but the problem is that Nathaniel Kahn isn't much of an interviewer. He continually reaches the same conclusions about his father, and this can become taxing to the viewer's patience (the second and final interview he conducts with his mother is fairly pointless). My Architect feels a good 15 minutes longer than it needs to be.

To Nathaniel Kahn's credit, he does an admirable job bringing objectivity to the movie. His personal attachment to the material doesn't cause the film's scope to be too narrow, yet it still vibrates with love for this man -- a man who had obvious deficiencies in the world of monogamous relationships -- and one really couldn't blame Nathaniel if he was not able to forgive his father for those deficiencies. But Nathaniel, despite the fact that his father figure was a person who would show up at his house randomly and never for a very long amount of time, maintains an infectious sense of wonderment and admiration as he learns more about Louis.

Purely in terms of filmmaking, My Architect is a flawed movie, but it has a transcendent quality that is fueled by the passion of the director behind it. Nathaniel Kahn got the most important thing right -- he made a documentary about a subject that was well worth documenting, and did so while mostly keeping self-indulgent tendencies at bay.

(A New Yorker Films release. Previously opened in New York. Opens in Los Angeles on January 23. 2004. Expands to more cities at later dates.)