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: #15197 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-02-15
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, 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

My father, my architect
Nathaniel Kahn's search for his late father, famed architect Louis Kahn, is a magnificent personal soul-searching for both legacy and family. The camera angles and perspectives extrapolate the insights that (Louis) Kahn brought to his works; the testimonies of friends and associates are emotive and passionate with love, respect, admiration, and joy. Nathaniel brings the eagerness and devotion as a loving adult for his father by highlighting the beauty, power, and simplicity of the buildings Louis designed--as well as revealing his personal quirks and flaws in a way that is wholesome and honest. More importantly, Nathaniel also embraces openly and with vulnerability the two half-sisters he hardly knew, looking to reunite the distant members of his family to resolve the issues his father could not face. The crowning moment of this film takes place in Bangla Desh when a key statesman breaks down in tears as he explains to Nathaniel why the state capitol building is a national monument of independence, democracy, and the future of the country, brought to them by Louis's genius.

A son's journey to find his father
While it won't win the Academy Award this year, up against the stellar CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS and THE FOG OF WAR, this film is still well worth seeing. Despite being a personal narrative that gives very little background about architecture, I left it feeling for the first time that architecture is truly an art in its own right.

It's the personal nature of the film that does it. You see how personally Louis I. Khan took his edificial creations-- and how indifferent he was to other creations, namely his son, the filmmaker, who barely knew him. As the son travels the world to see his father's buildings, he uncovers much about his father. Two secret families. A rough childhood. Influence of Judaism. Influence of Hinduism.

The amateurish parts of the film are saved, in my opinion, by the sincerity of the son's journey. He's not afraid to reveal embarrassing truths about his father, nor make himself look awkward (as in the hilarious sequence at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem). Could the film be more slick, more polished? Sure. But like his father's scarred concrete walls, he is not afraid to let the flaws show.

Best film on an architect since...... ever?
Are you an Architect? Are you married to one? Ever even spoken to one? If you're like most people, architects are mystical creative creatures, often men, always wearing black polonecks, living in gorgeous houses with even more gorgeous wives, designing stupendous buildings in the flash of an eye.

Well it's not like that really. Although this film doesn't really give us architects a much better image either. Nathaniel's film is, or was for him, a film to find out some of the truths about his father, Louis Kahn, a mystical figure who would appear infrequently in Nathaniel's life. So, for him, the making of this film was a voyage of discovery, about a man, his father, who just happened to be an architect. And, umm, how shall we put this: not married to Nate's mother.

To the rest of us architects however, Kahn is not just AN architect, he is THE architect. His buildings, sublime and perfect, are all too few: one of the best is rarely seen by the Western world, as it is in Bangladesh. The film's journey along the way shows us both the human side (all too human - one wife and two mistresses....), and the architectural side: his office, archive clips of Kahn on site, and wonderfully catty comments from the arch Arch himself, Phillip Johnson. Could he perhaps be... a little jealous? Thoughts of Ann Rand's the Fountainhead spring to mind here....

For a documentary, it's fascinating, and well deserves to win the Oscar this year. As an architectural text book however, it's a must see, a must buy the DVD, especially if you are an architect, or are married to one, or want to know what makes them tick. Students: go and see this film right now. Teachers: gather up those artistic few in the class, and give them all a pencil after the film. Wives and girlfriends: don't go near an architect unless you want to share.

Thanks Nathaniel, for sharing your father with all of us.