Product Description

A riveting tale of love, art, betrayal and forgiveness -- in which the illegitimate son of a legendary architect undertakes a worldwide exploration to discover and understand his father's and the personal choices he made.

Louis I. Kahn is considered by many historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century. While Kahn's artistic legacy was a search for truth and clarity, his personal life was secretive and chaotic. His mysterious death in a train station men's room left behind three families -- one with his wife and two with women with whom he had long-term affairs. The child of one of these extra-marital relationships, Kahn's only son Nathaniel, sets out on a journey to reconcile the life and work of this mysterious man.

Revealing the haunting beauty of his father's monumental creations and taking us to the rarified heights of the world's celebrated architects and deep within his own divided family, Nathaniel's personal journey becomes a universal investigation of identity, a celebration of art and ultimately, of life itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8241 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-02-15
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.com
One nonfiction film that truly creates a narrative journey, My Architect is filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn's engrossing search for his father. Louis Kahn, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, died in 1974 and left behind a highly compartmentalized life, including two children born out of wedlock to two mistresses. Nathaniel interviews the members of this somewhat puzzled family, but his deepest experiences are visits to the buildings that his father made (such as the grand Salk Institute in La Jolla, California), culminating in an emotional trip to Bangladesh. Here, Louis Kahn designed a massive government complex, a soaring achievement (and fascinating paradox--a Muslim capital designed by a Jewish man). This film asks: where does an artist truly live? In his life, or in the work he leaves behind? Nathaniel Kahn takes an amazingly even-tempered approach to this, given his personal stake in the story, and the result is a uniquely stirring movie. --Robert Horton

From The New Yorker
A traditional quest, superbly told. Nathaniel Kahn seeks to understand the life of his father, the architect Louis I. Kahn, a task made even more difficult by the fact that Kahn had three separate and coexisting families: a wife and two mistresses with one child apiece. For his part, Nathaniel was an illegitimate son and only eleven when his father died; his interviews are laced with raw, uncut feeling for a man he never really knew. Throughout the documentary, he uses Kahn's buildings (beautifully photographed) as a kind of wedge into his father's motivations and personality. He discovers that Kahn's more famous contemporaries, like I. M. Pei, appear haunted by his career: is it better to have designed three or four unexampled buildings, as Kahn did, or to have had a successful, high-profile architectural practice? Perhaps more surprisingly, the women in Kahn's life don't regret the way he treated them. Anne Tyng, Kahn's co-worker and mistress, explains her affection this way: "The ideas that you work on together connect you always somehow." In the end, Nathaniel's homage to his father demonstrates what it was like to be caught in his creative whirlwind. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Story of a Bastard Son
This is a documentary by a son of a man with 3 families. Nathaniel was the son from the youngest of the women. The father died when he was 11 and he never really knew him because the father lived with the wife he was married to. The man did visit at times and his mother always believed that he died while coming to visit them and move in forever. The man was a famous architect named Louis Kahn. He was highly revered in the architect world and it was a bit shocking that he had been hiding 3 families for many years from each other. They did not meet until the funeral. The son makes a very special film that haunts us with sadness. His interaction with his mother is the most moving. She is uncomfortable in talking with him and is bothered by his questions. A highly recommended film.

THIS IS A TOUCHING FILM--AND MAKES YOU THINK, TOO!
This film starts off slowly but it "grows on you". It's a son's discovery of his mostly absent father who died 30 years ago when he was 11! You would think it would be a little too late to revivify one's father after 30 years. But, no, the film maker-son DOES revivify his father! And, after 30 years, what is left? The son, yes. And the architectural influence and works by his father which continue to influence the lives of people still here. It's quite a noble tribute to the father by the son. Well, done! Recommended. boland7214@aol

A moving account of a great artist's life and impact
Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) was one of the 20th century's most influential and well-regarded architects. He designed such important structures as the Exeter Library at Philips Exeter Academy, and the Capital Complex in Dhaka (Dacca), Bangladesh, and his work was revered by high-flying architects such as I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. But his habits of overwork and overextension, bidding for too many projects and becoming obsessive about his all-consuming passion for architecture, led him to die of a heart attack, bankrupt and alone, in a Penn Station bathroom as he was on his way home to Philadelphia from New York. When he died, he left not only a wife and their daughter, but also a mistress and his second daughter, as well as a second mistress and his third child, his 11-year-old son, Nathaniel, who made this beautiful documentary about his father, "My Architect: A Son's Journey."

Nathaniel Kahn's documentary visits and discusses the works of his father, some of which Nathaniel had never seen before, and shows the emotional and artistic impact that Louis Kahn and his work made on others, both architects and clients. But more than being a simple homage to his father and his works, the film shows Nathaniel's search to understand his secretive, mysterious father's compartmentalized life and to strengthen his connection to the father he lost so early. Louis Kahn's charisma and charm, his love for his children and the feelings of great love and loyalty he engendered in the women in his life are all made clear, as are his self-absorption, his need to make every commitment in life secondary to his commitment to his work, his flashes of arrogance, and his lack of empathy for others. The question which underpins the whole film is whether the gifts of an artistic genius whose work engenders tears of appreciation from his clients and fellow architects can justify his remote, selfish, and disconnected life.

Nathaniel Kahn doesn't try to answer any of these questions once and for all. He asks difficult questions and presses those he interviews (from great architects to his own mother) to be honest about his father's failings and selfishness as well as his brilliance and occasional tenderness. The responses are at times surprising and always touching.