an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
“My” vs. “Architect”
On My Architect:
A Son’s Journey[1]
Thorsten
Botz-Bornstein
Documentaries work with “documents” though, since Meliès and Lumière,
the antagonism of “documentary vs. fiction” has been far from absolute. The
“truth” sought by documentaries is not necessarily contained in the documents
they display but can, just like in art, flow out of the film in the form of a
message that transcends the documents presented.
Which
truth is Nathaniel Kahn is looking for? Obviously, it is an intimate truth
linked to the knowledge that a son wants to obtain about his father. It is a
truth that appears in the form of a desire because here a son is trying to establish
a “postmortem” contact with, or even a belated recognition by, his father. The
film is honest and succeeds in telling this intimate story giving us the
impression that here some “truth” has been discovered and conveyed.
The
problem is that, in principle, this truth has nothing to do with architecture.
The fact that Louis Kahn is “the greatest American architect of the 20th
century” is a completely different kind of “truth” – if it is one at all.
Different
truths need different methods of inquiry. The worst of all verdicts that could
be made about this film is: You cannot make a film simultaneously about your
father and about a famous architect – even if your father is that famous
architect.
I concede
that such a verdict would be too harsh, first of all because the film attempts
– with a certain degree of success – to rethink some of the relatively rarely
discussed links between architecture and spirituality, between architectural
space and its symbolizing power of personal experience.
However,
even this subject is not approached in a manner that architectural subjects should be approached – that is, critically. It is presented on an almost purely emotional level.
It is
therefore all the more surprising that Nathaniel relates, exposes, and analyses
the complicated “family life” of Louis Kahn in such a critical way. Having
married Esther Israeli in 1930, Kahn had relationships with Anne Tyng in the
1950s and with Harriet Pattison in the 1960s. The three children from three
different women know hardly anything about each other. During the film many
things hard to swallow are discovered, discussed, and speculated about.
Nathaniel interviews his half-sisters and aunts who make contrasting claims
about Louis Kahn; in the end even his mother does not agree with some of
Nathaniel’s own ideas. The result is a rather strong statement about Louis Kahn
“the father” although, or perhaps because,
things are left open ended. Nathaniel sketches the image of an obsessed,
tormented man who certainly did what most human beings would find impossible to
do.
Unfortunately
Nathaniel does not invest ten percent of the same critical attitude into the
examination of Louis Kahn the architect. This is particularly regrettable
because the idea of willfully mixing together an emotional story about a son
and a father on the one hand, and the search for “spirituality in architecture”
on the other, could have been very
interesting. In order to achieve this however, it would have been necessary to
eliminate the “great” from the word “architect” that clings to everything
Nathaniel wants show about his father in this film. Just a little of the irony
and distance that is present in the “family matters” part could have solved a
large part of this problem.
Still, the attempt as such remains fascinating:
a son tries to retrieve the spirit of his father by experiencing it through
architectural space. The fact that Kahn himself was somehow obsessed with
“spirituality” in architecture might even be secondary here. In Nathaniel’s
film however, these possibilities remain at the level of pure suggestion since
he suppresses the very contradictions and ironical constellations that would
make such a “mixture” interesting. Instead of skillfully playing out “My”
against “Architect,” he compresses the film’s concept into the strange-sounding
formula “My Architect.” By doing this he sacrifices the opportunity to say
something really valuable about Louis Kahn the architect. This is all the more
deplorable since he has a real talent for filming architectural space or human
living space as such.
One of the
most naïve strategies used by Nathaniel is the introduction, towards the end of
the film, of a kind of prologue by the Indian architect Doshi on Kahn’s
Ahmedabad building in
This is an
unacceptable strategy. Nathaniel could have interviewed another Indian
architect, for example Charles Correa, who would have declared that in
Nathaniel
had himself driven to the
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes