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Reconstructing My Architect
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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My Architect: A Son’s Journey
Directed by Nathaniel Kahn. With Harriet Pattison, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Anne Tyng, Sue Ann Kahn, Kathy Condé, Alexandra Tyng, Jack McAllister, Shamsul Wares, Edmund Bacon and Robert Woodrow. (116 minutes) At the Kendall Square, the Coolidge Corner, and the West Newton.
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In My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn uses the documentary form to explore the life-long puzzle of his father, the famous architect Louis I. Kahn. Everything about Kahn was mysterious, especially to Nathaniel, who was 11 when his father died without ever having acknowledged him or his mother, Harriet Pattison, publicly. Kahn, an Estonia-born Jew, didn’t forge a true career until his 50s, when he became celebrated for the only building he ever designed in Philadelphia, his home town — the Richards Medical Research Building. An imposing, tyrannical man with scarred features (from a childhood accident with hot coals), a massive granite face, and a mop of white hair, he had a wife, Esther, and a daughter, Sue Ann, his only official family. Few people even knew about Harriet, a landscape architect who collaborated with him, or about his earlier liaison with Anne Tyng, who worked in his office and bore him another daughter, Alex. Even his 1978 death was a mystery: at 73, bankrupt, he collapsed of a heart attack in Penn Station, and it was three days before his body was identified. The arc of the movie is Nathaniel’s quest to put together a portrait of his father, a quest that takes him to see his dad’s buildings in New Haven, California, Texas, New Jersey, and finally Jerusalem and Bangladesh. Nathaniel’s personal investigation of this work, which is annotated by interviews with I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry, among others, reveals how Kahn worked through his early love of classical models to a deeper connection with the mysticism they reflected — that is, how he learned to infuse that classicism, so chill and forbidding in the Richards Building, with wonder and warmth. (The interior of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is a great example, as is the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, which is filled with cubicles like Advent-calendar surprises.) Meanwhile, interviews with the people who knew Lou fill in the greater gaps in Nathaniel’s knowledge. Ann Tyng, regal at 80, and Harriet Pattison are both as tough as Lou evidently was — and as Esther, who looked through them at his funeral, must have been. (She survives only in an old TV interview Nathaniel excerpts.) We meet Kathy CondŽ, his secretary, who kept his secrets; his drinking companion Jack McAllister; a cousin who refuses at first to believe Nathaniel is Kahn’s real son. We meet his daughters, who — in an extraordinary scene — wander with Nathaniel through the only private residence he designed, the Fisher House in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, where Sue Ann Kahn remembers asking him why he never built a home for his own family. Nathaniel falls into visual clichŽs and puts obvious, sentimental musical choices on the soundtrack, and the film would certainly be better without his voiceover apostrophes to his dad. But none of the movie’s flaws takes away from its emotional fullness. You can hardly believe the moments he gets in some of these interviews. When Edmund Bacon, planning director in charge of rebuilding Philly’s downtown in the late ’60s, now an irascible senior, explains that he fired Kahn from the project because "the purity of my conception was being encrusted by Lou’s fantasies" and declaims the impracticality of American architects in general, you begin to see why Kahn, an uncompromising visionary, had such an upward struggle. You want to slap the construction engineer who worked on the Kimbell Museum when he laughingly compares the endlessly imaginative Kahn to the Energizer Bunny. But you also meet Charles and Susanna Jones, who sheltered Harriet when she got pregnant and even offered to adopt Nathaniel; like Harriet’s ramrod WASP family, they were immune to Lou’s charm, but Susanna says that he was the love of Harriet’s life, "and you can’t judge that, because a love like that is on the side of life." She’s wonderful, as is Robert Woodrow, who commissioned an enchanted "symphony boat" that looks like something out of an early sci-fi picture. When Nathaniel identifies himself, Woodrow bursts into tears and throws his arms around him; it turns out he knew about the boy and had kept it to himself. And there’s a passionate, tearful eulogy by the architect Shamsul Wares, who stands with Nathaniel outside his father’s final (and most exquisite) building, the capitol in Bangladesh. Wares hopes Nathaniel will forgive Lou’s flaws; he disappointed the people he was closest to, but it was a great love that built the capitol. And it’s an amazing final chapter for this deeply affecting movie.
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