Film Reviews

My Architect

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Anne Tyng
• Details: US / 116 mins / (12PG).

While he may be lauded as one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, it's obvious that Louis I Kahn was never going to be in the running for Father of the Year. At least that's according to Nathaniel Kahn, the architect's illegitimate son, who attempts to understand something of the father he barely knew in his vividly personal documentary, My Architect.
Despite a wildly successful career, Louis I Kahn died alone in the toilets of Penn station in New York in 1974 with debts of over a half-a-million dollars and his body lay unclaimed for two days. Since he wasn't part of Kahn's legitimate family, Nathaniel was left out of his Louis' will, but he sets out to try and understand something of his father, both professionally and personally here as he interviews his father's peers, friends and family, and questions the impact he had on their lives. Of course, this all further complicates Nathaniel's own ideas as to just who his old man was. Indeed, the impression that the younger Kahn is wrestling with his own demons is a little too obvious at times in My Architect, and Nathaniel probably should have worked out some of his excess emotional frustrations before the cameras started rolling. That quibble aside, My Architect is a poignant document of one man's search for the father he had but never knew.

Review by Garreth Murphy