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Director Nathaniel Kahn hunts down the ghost of his father in the work
he left behind in the CIFF favorite (and IFP Spirit Award nominee) "My Architect."
"The reception I've received in Chicago has been tremendous. The questions
people have asked me have been very intelligent and they've forced me to think
about who I am and what I'm doing. It seems like you have a very clear sense
of identity here as a city. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't make a mistake moving
to New York after school instead of Chicago."
We're at Bin 36, beneath the looming shadow of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City parking sculptures, talking with Nathaniel Kahn, director of "My Architect."
Winner of a Golden Hugo for Best Documentary and an Audience Favorite Award at the Chicago International Film Festival, "My Architect" documents the life of the director's father Louis Kahn, a man whose work is studied and admired by some of America's finest architectural minds.
Some of the Kahn's finer works include the Saulk Institute, the Richards Medical Research Building, the Exeter library, the Kimball Art Museum, and the Capital of Bangladesh. He is regularly cited as one of the foremost architects of the late 20th century by critics, scholars and colleagues.
"To the world of architecture," says Kahn, "my father needs no introduction. To the broader world, though, he's mostly unknown. His story has brought a lot of attention to architecture, which is great. It's a profound and moving art form."
While "My Architect" is largely concerned with the buildings the elder Kahn produced, inexorably intertwined within the film's story are the painful details of his personal life. A man known both for a singular and defiantly obstinate dedication to his work and a tendency towards womanizing (despite possessing a heavily scarred face and otherwise unattractive appearance), Kahn had children with three different women and was only married to one.
The film opens with Nathan Kahn rifling through microfiche files, searching for a story in the New York Times about his father's death. Bankrupt and alone on the way back from working on a project in India, Louis Kahn had collapsed of a heart attack in the downstairs men's room in Penn Station. His body lay unclaimed in the city morgue for days because, for some inexplicable reason, Kahn had scratched out the address on his passport. It was one of many parts of Kahn's life that presented more questions than answers.
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002: Nathaniel Kahn
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