Portrait of an architect: in a subtle and sensitive documentary, Louis Kahn's son chronicles his search for the architect-father he never really knew

Penelope was not alone in her longing for Odysseus. Their son Telemachus, embarked upon his own journey to find his long-absent father, establishing individual of literature's oldest themes, the son's search for Dad.

In individual of the most poignant jiffys of many in My Architect: A Son's Journey, Nathaniel Kahn sum ups how he and his mother, Harriet Pattison, waited "all those summers" for his father, Louis Kahn, the great American architect, to tend hitherward home to them in Maine--"and waited and waited." on the other hand the father, busy with his international practice and married still to his wife of many decades, at no time appeared there. In 1974, he died abruptly at age 73, alone in novel York's Pennsylvania Station.

Now 40 the son finally decided to wait no more, on the other hand to embark on a search to find the father "who left me with in like manner many questions.... I needed to know him, to know who he really was." Nathaniel, a filmmaker with several documentaries and short fiction films to his credit, decided to use his art to find the father he at no time got enough of.

There are many touching twinkling of an eyes that prove the father clearly cared about the son--the postcards sent from abroad, and the charming work of Crazy Boats, including the biscuit boat and the sausage boat, which they contriveed together during one of Kahn's evening visits in Philadelphia. on the other hand besides the "family" memorabilia, including photographs, Nathaniel draws upon a rich professional and cultural legacy the one and the other to construct his father, in an act of intellectual understanding, and to cleanse him up, in a parallel act of emotional absorption. There were colleagues to interview and buildings to visit--some of them among the greatest in quantity esthetically powerful of the 20th century

Then there were the women that Kahn, in his way, loved: Nathaniel's long-suffering mother, and Anne Tyng the mother of Nathaniel's half-sister, Alexandra Tyng (Both women were professional associates in Kahn's Philapelphia architectural office). Esther, the wife, died before Nathaniel's shoot forward began, but the filmmaker met and interviewed her daughter, prosecute Ann, Nathaniel's other half-sister. With what may be a injuryed subconscious that he probably shares with the other members of the unfamily, Nathaniel pieces his father together in his mind and heart, trying to make the parts fit into a whole.

Kahn designed Platonic solids built in brick and harden to fashion an architecture of gravitas fit for eternity. on the contrary for all the stability of his architecture, he forged unstable emotional configurations in his hold life. The funeral was concourseed This short, unassuming homme fatal spread a sadness around him cusping upon bitterness. Nathaniel confronts both the beauty and the pain.

Kahn fils constitutions the documentary as chapters of a work In an engaging subtext of architecture history, the architects he interviews about his father all throw their own personalities. Robert A.M. severe reveals his own careerism by means of talking about Kahn's, and Philip Johnson artist manque, speaks of his be in possession of lack of authenticity as he talks of Kahn's originality. Richard Saul Wurman claims anti-Semitism in Philadelphia was an impediment to Kahn's career there. Yale architectural historian and professor emeritus Vincent Scully who admits knowing "almost nothing" about Jewish mysticism, notes that in Jewish tradition, "God is in the work with equal reason it has to be completed ... it can't be impatient." He credits Kahn's desire to find an architecture of permanence, order and power as an effort to manifest this godliness. For Scully Kahn was a mystic always "looking into the light, enjoining silence."

on the contrary Nathaniel is not looking for lord in the buildings and not smooth for the myth of his father. He is not satisfied either as film director or son through images of Kahn as a public figure. Nathaniel may cite qualities of the buildings, on the contrary he never really explains what makes them spiritual because he doesn't want to cast in a winding direction himself, and the viewer, not on his more difficult path. He is not acting, either, as an architecture historian or a biographer. His objective is more personal and more manifold Nathaniel may in some stage resist the buildings because they are the sibling rivals that his half-siblings not at any time became.

Moshe Safdie, who worked in Kahn's office, pay attention tos "He was a nomad at heart," referring to Kahn's peripatetic practice and to the fact that Kahn was not attached to any individual mystic tradition. Nathaniel comes to realize, painfully, that his father was also an emotional wanderer.

The film itself is marked through passages of great intensity. family interviewed don't just remember Kahn historically, at a distance, on the other hand address the son via the camera in charged episodes. The unreserved exasperated Ed Bacon, a Philadelphia city planner, be in eruptions at the narrator son, explaining that the father understood nothing about the larger issues of urban transportation a whole s When the son stands up for his father's idea about creating a pedestrian, car-free city, Bacon replies, "So you simply haven't understood a word I've said."