Saw My Architect last night with Gwen and a bunch of her co-workers. This is a documentary about the architect Louis Kahn by his son.
Kahn’s family life was complex, to put it gently. He was married and had two mistresses, and had one child by each of the ladies in his life–the filmmaker’s mother was the second of his mistresses, and to this day entertains the fantasy that he would have left his wife to live with her. Apparently all of the women knew of each other, but (unsurprisingly) had nothing to do with each other. Kahn’s cousin (who was interviewed in the film) disbelieved that the filmmaker could be Kahn’s son, since Kahn didn’t have a son, legitimately–apparently he wasn’t in on the whole story, though almost everyone else was.
The filmmaker didn’t know his father very well, since Kahn was rarely around–not only did he have a legit family, he apparently spent most of his time either at the office or travelling. So the movie is not just to document Kahn’s life: it’s a more personal project for the filmmaker to learn about his father, and inevitably, it winds up being a little self-regarding as a result.
Despite this, and despite the fact that it drags in spots, it’s a fascinating movie. Interviews with other leading architects of his generation (I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, etc) give us the sense that Kahn was “an architect’s architect” even though he had far fewer completed commissions than his peers. Kahn’s work is interesting to learn about: his schtick was monumental architecture. Some of his buildings are just plain ugly. Others, like the Salk Library, are beautiful but don’t seem to work well on a human scale–in that sense, they are monumental, but formalized, abstract, and not entirely functional.
At the end of the movie, however, we see Kahn’s last big project, which wasn’t completed until a decade after his death in 1974: the parliament and capital complex for Bangladesh. It is enormous, sprawling, and wonderful. A deliberative chamber is like a giant cylinder capped by a skylight, with a constellation of lights underneath. There is little to distract the eye, and it is easy to imagine being in that room removes you from petty everyday concerns and subconsciously reminds you of the importance of what happens there. The filmmaker interviews the Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who openly cries at what Kahn did for Bangladesh: by giving them this building, he says, Kahn gave them the institutions for democracy. Putting Kahn’s legacy in human terms as well as academic terms.