You’d think I’d have seen this earlier, and in fact I had a couple opportunities to see it when I worked at the AIA, but something always happened to make me miss it. I’m rather glad I didn’t see it with an audience of architects, because I’m sure my reaction is quite different from theirs. My Architect is made by Nathaniel Kahn, illegitimate son of famous (among architects, anyway) architect Louis Kahn. Nathaniel didn’t really know his father well – it turns out the senior Kahn had three families at the same time: his wife and daughter; Nathaniel and his mother; and a third woman and daughter – so this film is his attempt to find out more about his father through his work. I have some experience with a Louis Kahn building, as it happens – he built a dorm at Bryn Mawr College. Let me rephrase that: he built the ugliest, most uncomfortable, least popular dorm at Bryn Mawr. I also “interacted with” one of his most famous buildings, the Salk Institute in La Jolla (see my write-up of my San Diego trip for details).
So I wasn’t exactly surprised to see all the massive, unwelcoming, concrete (or, as I came to think of it, Kahn-crete) buildings throughout the movie. I was hoping for some explanation of why architects think these monstrously ugly and out-of-place structures are so admirable, especially considering most of the people who live and work in them loathe them, but I didn’t get it. The closest thing I got to an explanation was a bit on how Kahn saw Egyptian ruins, like the Temple of Luxor and the Pyramids, and for whatever reason decided these looming, windowless, monumental structures were just the thing for U.S. cities. Nathaniel Kahn spends a lot of his time in Philadelphia, because that was where Kahn was based and when Nathaniel and his mother lived. He never gets to the Bryn Mawr dorm, but Philadelphia does produce one of just two moments in the movie that truly sparkled for me. It offers famed city planner Edmund Bacon (father of Kevin, by the way), a welcome astringent contrarian amidst the inexplicable fawning. Bacon and Kahn butted heads over a redesign of Philadelphia’s downtown (apparently Kahn felt he had some droit de seigneur as the best-known architect in Philadelphia, whereas Bacon was more concerned with what would fit with the city). Bacon, a robust 92 years old at the time of filming, roars that he’s glad Kahn didn’t get to build downtown Philly because it would have been a nightmare (Kahn’s proposal was six gigantic concrete parking garages surrounding the city core, with City Hall at one end of the row of parking silos and a colossal monolith at the other end, so that people would park in the garages and walk downtown -- the right idea, I suppose, but so fantastically wrongly executed that it’s almost mind-boggling that it could ever be considered seriously), and when Nathaniel suggests that the Bacon-Kahn feud was just about two strong-willed men having different visions, Bacon hollers at him, “NO! You haven’t been listening to a thing I’ve said!” I wanted to hug him. He’s like the little boy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes – he’s about the only person in the whole movie who seems to realize that Kahn’s buildings have absolutely no relationship to their surroundings. Kahn was an artist, several Kahn colleagues in the movie insist – well, fine. He should have made sculptures that could be as detached and cold as he wanted, instead of buildings that people have to live and work in and that are supposed to be part of a community.
The only thing that changed my opinion of his work was at the very end. One of Kahn’s last jobs was building the capital building for Bangladesh as it was breaking away from Pakistan. It’s not that the building is that much better than his other work, although its monumentalism is much more fitting for a capital building than for, say, a university research lab, and it’s amazing how much using brick instead of concrete softens his hulking, windowless walls. No, it’s what, in the end, architecture is supposed to be about (if you listen to architects): how people relate to the building. It’s easy to see what the building means to the people of Bangladesh. It’s a symbol of their nation; it’s their identity. It’s quite moving, and it left me feeling a little softer toward Kahn.
But I’m not sure there’s much interest in it for most people. Nathaniel doesn't seem to find out much about his father; the people he talks to last worked with Kahn 30 or more years ago, and all they do is burnish his hagiography and make odd, pale excuses for his inexcusable behavior toward his wife, his girlfriends, and his children.
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