A House Is Not a Home

Built to last: Louis Kahn's Salk Institute, the first design he was truly happy with.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Louis Kahn's son searches his father's buildings for traces of a man he hardly knew.

by Sam Adams

Louis I. Kahn is often called the most important architect of the 20th century’s latter half, but to students at the University of Pennsylvania, his Richards Medical Center is a white elephant built of reinforced concrete. In My Architect, directed by Kahn’s son, Nathaniel, the two students approached for their opinion of the building can barely suppress their frustration. "People come here and pull out their cameras, and we just sit in the windows and laugh at them. It’s not a good place to work!"

Having suffered through four years using the library Kahn designed for Philips Exeter Academy, I can verify that Kahn's structures, however impressive from a distance, can be perversely impractical up close. A massive, graceful structure inspired by ancient fortresses, the library is a hollow concrete cube that floods with sunlight, a synthesis of the natural and man-made. It is also a perfect echo chamber, which means that people speaking at the front desk can be heard with perfect clarity on the fifth floor -- hardly ideal for quiet study.

As My Architect attests, Kahn could be as personally deficient as he was artistically fluent. Nathaniel is one of two children Louis had out of wedlock, each with a different woman; he never publicly acknowledged the relationships, or their offspring, during his lifetime. When he died in 1974, after collapsing in New York's Penn Station, Kahn was still married to his first wife, Esther. (The relationship also produced a daughter.) That he died in transit was all too fitting. When the police searched his body, they found Kahn's passport, but the address had been crossed out, as if to reject the idea of calling any place home.

In a sense, My Architect is a simple attempt to track down the father Nathaniel hardly knew, whom he saw at most once a week for the 11 years their lives overlapped. Though Nathaniel would be within his rights to go gunning for his dad's considerable reputation, there's nothing recriminatory about the film, and it doesn't settle for simple explanations. In a sense, it's Nathaniel's attempt to see his father as the rest of the world saw him, as a visionary genius rather than an absentee father, or at least find some way to reconcile the two.

Frank Gehry calls Kahn's designs "mystical," while I.M. Pei expresses envy over his focus on "quality, not quantity." But Edmund Bacon, who redesigned Center City in the early 1960s, denounces Kahn's (rejected) plans for the city as "brutal, totally insensitive, totally impractical." Without making a facile equation between the artist and his work, the film shows how the argument about Kahn's designs is reflected in a growing understanding of the man: That Kahn expected people to park in circular garages on Vine Street and walk into the city shows a utopianism untempered by a grasp of human nature, or at least of the American character.

In addition to interviewing his father's colleagues, Nathaniel and cinematographer Bob Richman lovingly film his structures. (Sometimes Nathaniel shoots with an old wind-up 8mm camera, while Richman films him doing it.) The camera glides through the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (described by a radio DJ as "a cement cattle barn"), and captures a stunning view of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where a man-made river splits a concrete plain and flows invisibly toward the sea. Described as the first building Louis was truly happy with (and completed only nine years before his death), it combines large, open labs with individual studies, each of which has an unobstructed view of the ocean. In a charming time-lapse shot that subtly recalls Koyaanisqatsi or the recent Rivers and Tides, the camera sits astride that man-made stream while a child scampers back and forth across it, her presence making the imposing structure feel approachable, humanized. Later, as if following her example, Nathaniel dons Rollerblades and slides along the ground, hopping the stream with just a hint of hesitation.

When people in My Architect talk about Louis Kahn, the film often inserts images of his work, rather than the man himself. Though Nathaniel recalls as "very embarrassing" the moment when he let slip to the Inquirer his desire to "hug" his father's buildings, there's a clear sense that the structures represent, at least to his son, the best and noblest parts of his father, the parts that couldn't be grasped in furtive visits, or by an 11-year-old's mind.

My Architect takes in other buildings as well: Nathaniel's childhood home, the office at 1501 Walnut St. where Louis would toss a key wrapped in yellow tracing paper to his son below, and where he would lock Nathaniel's mother, his colleague, in her office when his wife came to visit. And it returns almost obsessively to the North Philadelphia tenements where Louis lived as a child. The buildings are no more than husks now, but the camera keeps haunting their depopulated shells, as if expecting to catch a glimpse of the father Nathaniel long hoped was not dead, only disappeared. As the seasons change, the buildings remain, but time takes away their meaning, and leaves only their shape.

My Architect

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn A New Yorker release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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