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Building bonds
A filmmaker goes in search of answers to questions about a father — renowned architect Louis Kahn — he never really knew
BY TAMARA WIEDER

RISING SON: as an adult, Nathaniel Kahn (above and below right) has sought to learn more about his father, Louis (below left), who died two decades ago.






NATHANIEL KAHN has spent the last six years getting to know his father. Which wouldn’t be unusual, but for the fact that his father has been dead since 1974.

Louis Kahn’s body was found in a men’s room in Penn Station two decades ago — a troubling end to the life of a man considered by many to be one of the 20th century’s most important architects. Although his celebrated buildings include the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, California), the Phillips Exeter Academy Library (Exeter, New Hampshire), the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), and the Capital Complex (Dhaka, Bangladesh), the idealistic Kahn struggled throughout his architectural career, frequently losing commissions when his visions weren’t in line with the realities of his particular clients, deadlines, and budgets. At the time of his death, Kahn was bankrupt, and, in addition to his wife and daughter, he left behind two other women with whom he’d fathered illegitimate children — including his only son, Nathaniel.

In the younger Kahn’s new film, My Architect — recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary — the renowned architect’s son goes in search of answers to questions about the father who died when he was 11 years old, and in the process comes to appreciate just how much he’s lost.

Q: When did you first know you would make this film?

A: Certainly there’re questions that’ve been rattling around for me since I was a little boy. But I think when I was first in college, at Yale, I had Vincent Scully as a professor in an art-history class, and I sat in the dark through most of the semester and watched him talking about the history of art, knowing the whole time that this is somebody who really knew my father better than most people that I’d ever met knew him. And he eventually got around to his lecture on modern architecture, somewhere deep in the semester, and so much of it was about my father. So afterwards I went up to him and I said, "I’m Louie Kahn’s son," and he sort of fell backwards on the stage, and tears sprang out of his eyes, and he hugged me, and then he held me at arm’s length, and then he hugged me again. He just couldn’t get over himself. It was this feeling of both pride and embarrassment. Because it didn’t have anything to do with me; it was for my father. But clearly this was a man who commanded such sort of powerful emotional response even after his death.

I think that was the moment that made me think, gee, I really don’t know who this man was. I only know my own memories of him, but I don’t know really who he was in the outside world, because I had no experience of that. And I think for a long time you walk around kind of keeping a story like that very close to your heart, and I’ve made other films, and written plays, told other stories, but this was something obviously that I kept sort of coming up against. I tried to write it at one point as a screenplay, but really just didn’t know enough. I hadn’t done my research. I also realized that that wasn’t the right form at that time, for me to approach this subject, because I really didn’t know about father-son relationships. So this film grew out of that desire. That was about five, six years ago that I began that journey.

Q: What was the filmmaking process like for you? Was it emotional every day?

A: Yeah. These films, because I’m not independently wealthy, these films are difficult from so many standpoints, and the first and most formidable is the financial standpoint, and how to fund something which needs to take you to India and Bangladesh, and needs to be photographed in a beautiful way; you can’t go photographing Lou’s architecture with a Fisher-Price camera. It wouldn’t work. Other stories you could, but not this story.

Q: Did you feel an even greater responsibility to this film because it’s about your father?

A: Yeah, sure. I also think it’s an advantage and it’s a handicap. It’s an advantage in the sense that I had certain access to people, and it’s a handicap in that I think to tell the story, you have to face things that sometimes are painful, and to do that, I think it took me longer than it would’ve taken me if I was not facing something so personal. So definitely, the filmmaking process was one that was difficult, from a lot of standpoints, but I did find — and I think you find with most things that you commit yourself to — the more you give, the more it gives back. And just when you think you can’t give any more, something wonderful happens, and you can go on. So it began rather slowly, and tentatively, and I tried to preserve that in the film; the first several interviews, encounters, are a little more formal, and I’m a little more tentative with my questions, and a little less personal, and then eventually it just becomes more fluid.

Q: You never appear visibly emotional in the film, though a lot of other people do. Why is that?

A: That’s a thing I wanted the audience to wonder about. Because I have a lot of feelings that I don’t share in the film, but by telling too much, you end up telling less. What I think would be more of a handicap would be for me to try to tell you how I felt about things with narration, or to put in some of the scenes where I break down and cry or something like that. There were scenes like that, but they seemed to make the emotion less, and to define it too much. Because I think part of what I wanted to preserve in the film, and what the editor and I fought very hard to preserve, is that there’s a lot of ambiguity around [my father], but you only have two hours to get that; you don’t have a whole lifetime of accumulated ambiguity. So to get that in two hours is hard. It’s a struggle.

Q: How much better do you feel you know your father now, having made the film?

A: I think I know him a lot better. But it doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot more questions.

Q: Yeah, I wondered if making this movie left you with fewer questions, or more.

A: More questions. More defined questions. And in a way, a greater sense of loss, because the loss is very human now. It’s like, I miss the person, not the idea of the person.

Q: Or the image that you had of him when you were an 11-year-old.

A: Exactly. Which is, just by its very nature, limited. So the person that I miss now is somebody who I could just sit down with and have a beer with and talk to, and I think on that level, I really do miss my father. And I suppose in the end, that really is the level a son should miss his father, rather than missing the legend or anything else; you miss that human interaction. Which seems to be what other people miss about him, too.

Q: Well, his colleague and lover Anne Tyng said she doesn’t miss him, because she feels he’s here in you, in his buildings, and in her daughter, your half-sister Alex. Do you feel that too?

A: No, I don’t think it’s quite that simple for me. I mean, I’m not walking around every day missing him, but I certainly think about him every day, and I can’t say that that was the case before I made the movie. It was when I was a little boy, and then I think it went through a lot of years of not being that way. And now he’s kind of back around. That’s a comforting thing. It’s also emotional. I think one of the aspects of the film that audiences seem to have responded to is this idea that people who are dead aren’t really gone. And that’s really true. They’re really around, and not just the ones who built buildings. No matter what someone did in their life, we carry them with us.

Q: What did you learn about your father that most surprised you?

A: I think the part that made him most human to me was how hard he struggled. Much more so than the individual achievement, that part is the part that I’m most impressed by about him. I really respect it. There are things about him that I think he should’ve done better with. But I certainly truly respect how he struggled, and that he was not willing to give up until — well, he was never willing to give up, but he wasn’t willing to kind of let something go until he felt it was right. And I think that’s a kind of message, too, that has a lot of resonance for today, because we live in a world that’s pretty damn disposable, and people are willing to compromise for any number of reasons that seem like good ones at the time, but in the end, kind of limit the depth of their experience. And he wasn’t willing to do that.

I think one of the areas of this film that I like especially is the area where I talk about the disappointments. You know, all the things that he designed that didn’t get built. For most people, myself included, that would be amazingly daunting. I mean, how do you go on when thing after thing is not working out? That just feels like a really remarkable quality that he had, and some of that was probably his immigrant mentality, and part of it was the confidence on some level that if he was able to carry something to the level where he was ready to let go, that it would be good. And it’s borne out so wonderfully by that comment by I.M. Pei, when he says, "Three or four masterpieces are more important than 50 or 60 buildings." And hey, that’s a big statement for a guy like Pei, who has made 50 or 60 buildings, and has made some arguably very, very fine buildings, great buildings, and yet here he is, way more successful than Lou on so many levels, saying that what [Lou] did is just the most important thing he could possibly do.

Q: Your father must’ve felt that way, too, or he probably wouldn’t have been able to go on.

A: Absolutely. I think there’s no question that he did feel that. But I also think he was probably aware of his own limitations. People involved in artistic pursuits, one of the hardest things is to write your own instruction manual. And we all have to write our own instruction manual. How do you get to what’s best in you? How do you really get to the point where you’re truly being creative, and doing what you do best? And what do you do when you run across problems? I think Lou was pretty aware of his own instruction manual. He knew that he couldn’t dash something off. He knew that he needed a strong client. He knew that it had to be not about money, or it wasn’t going to work out. I think a lot of times things got eliminated because they just didn’t fit those criteria that he needed — given his set of abilities and his set of limitations — to come up with something really good. And he was willing to let that stuff go. So I think those were things that I found out about him that surprised me, and also made me love the guy, for his ability to kind of insist on — not just egotistically doing it his way, but doing it in a way in which he thought he would be giving his best. And that kind of pursuit of excellence isn’t a vain thing at all. In a way it’s more of a humble thing. "I don’t want to do it unless I can do it the way that I know I can do it."

Q: Because perhaps he would’ve had more success if he had done it the other way.

A: Absolutely. There’s no question. There are plenty of buildings that he designed that were ready to go, everybody was happy, and he would come in the morning that the plans were being delivered and say, "I dreamed something last night; I’ve got a better idea." And sometimes those things would cost him the entire job. It’s interesting; it’s certainly a tonic for our kind of volume-centric age. I mean, talk to a writer: the struggle of writing a book is so enormous, so vast. And they can’t do two or three at one time. And you have to say, "This is the last fucking book I’m ever going to write; I can’t stand this" if it’s going to be any good.

Q: And then to get to the end of the book and not be able to sell it ...

A: Right! Devastating. And yet then you’ve got to start all over again. So I don’t know, those are things I’ve just come to admire more than ever, people who are able to do that. It’s tough.

Q: How do you hope viewers will come away from the film feeling about your father?

A: I think every viewer needs to find their own thing in it, but I certainly wanted to tell an uplifting story in the end, a story that would be life-affirming. I think there’s so much around right now that’s about how rotten things are. That’s not my bent. So I wanted to tell a story that would be, in the end, life-affirming. And I guess I really wanted to tell a story, on some level, of love. I also wanted to tell a story that would grab you and entertain you for a couple hours. That’s important to me. I want people to be taken on a journey, and be somewhere different at the end. I struggled a lot with that, with the people I made the film with, to make sure, as much as possible anyway, within the limitations of our own minds and our own material, to try to create an experience that would be not be fundamentally educational, but fundamentally kind of engaging and hopefully entertaining. And maybe enlightening too. I certainly wanted to tell a story that was not black and white, because I think so much of life is not; it’s so gray. I definitely wanted to tell a story that leaves you with questions, and hopefully good ones.

Q: In the film, your mother says she isn’t angry at your father for not being there for the two of you. My sense was that you are, or were at the time you had that conversation with her.

A: Well, the thing is, my father died when I was so young, and when someone dies when you’re that young, and also when you admire him so much as a kid, which I did, it’s very hard to feel those emotions. And I certainly didn’t feel those emotions about him while he was alive, ever. So to feel them later, I suppose on some level is kind of scary, because you feel you’re going to lose what little you have, and that you’ll somehow change your memories. So feeling anger for my father is the most difficult thing for me. And there are some moments in the film where I kind of get close to that, and I think you’ve named one of them. There are a few others. There are a few moments. They’re not directly expressed by saying, "I’m angry at you." But there’s certainly an edge to them. And that’s about as close as I could get to those emotions. I know that they’re there, but also, I didn’t want to make a film that was about my anger. Because I’m not sure what that would give an audience, particularly. And I’m also not sure what it would give me, really. Certainly not within this context. That’s for a private venue.

Q: That’s for the therapist.

A: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, at the same time I also think that it’s good for audiences to think about that, as it has been for me: well, why isn’t he more angry? Or, why aren’t these people more angry? That illuminates certain aspects of my father’s genius for kind of getting what he needed from people, that was fundamental to his whole make-up. And I do think there’s tremendous hurt and disappointment in the women whom he didn’t treat that well. That’s there. I’m sure the film will be a therapist’s field day. That’s all right. It’s what they’re paid to do.

Q: At the end of the film, you say you’ve found the right time and place to say goodbye to your father. Do you feel like you’ve really done that?

A: Well, I think on a certain level. Certainly to this very active search for the man. Although I have to say that things keep happening, and sometimes I instinctively grab for the camera that should be next to me. And I suppose that will probably always happen.

Q: Right; there must be so much more to uncover.

A: Oh my God, there’s so much more. People call all the time; I got three calls today from various people who knew him. And they’re all interesting stories. But on a certain level, yeah, I mean, that was sort of how I was feeling at that time. I don’t think you ever put something like this to bed.

Q: As a filmmaker, maybe, but as a son I can’t imagine that you do.

A: No, I don’t think you ever do. And I think in a lot of ways, he’s more around now than he’s ever been. But it’s also saying goodbye to a childhood vision of him. And the vision that’s kind of introduced in the beginning of the film is definitely changed now. And that’s always a fundamental fear, I think, of going on a journey like this: you think, well, am I going to lose what little I have? Because if you have a dream memory of someone, you don’t necessarily want to know more, because that’s your own special thing. But in this case, [I found] in going on that journey you gain so much more.

Q: What do you think is Lou Kahn’s greatest legacy?

A: That’s a hard question. I think his buildings, in what they are, are very significant. But I also think that the intention with which they were made is perhaps his greatest legacy. That it is possible, through using one’s individual gifts, whatever they may be, it is possible to leave the world a better place. And that’s a bold, maybe highly idealistic thing to say. But when I saw what happened in Dhaka, Bangladesh, what he was able to achieve, it’s true. You can. At the same time, I think his life raises some questions. The other legacy is really a personal one, and that is, how do you balance your work and your life? I think it’s an open question. And I don’t think it’s impossible. I think it may have been for him. But it isn’t impossible, and I think the legacy there is that there’s a cautionary tale, too. There’s the legacy of the cautionary tale, for people who do want to push things to the limit of what a human being is able to do. And I suppose maybe the last element is that I think that if life is a candle, Lou burned the whole damn thing. And that seems pretty good.

My Architect opens on February 13 at the Kendall Square Cinema, in Cambridge, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre, in Brookline. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com


Issue Date: February 6 - 12, 2004
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