Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) is considered by experts to be one of the most important architects of the twentieth century. His best work stands proudly alongside the creations of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe. Yet he died deep in debt of a heart attack in the men's room of Penn Station in New York City. Since his address was crossed out on his passport, his body laid in a morgue unclaimed for two days. Kahn's official family consisted of his wife Esther and a daughter Sue Ann. But two others lovers came to his funeral. One was Anne Tyng, a partner in his architectural firm who had a daughter by Kahn named Alexandra. The other was Harriet Pattison, a landscape architect whose son Nathaniel is the director of this film. Twenty-five years after the death of his famous father, he decides to go on a quest to learn more about this mysterious man and his obsession with architecture.
Kahn was born on an Estonian island where at a young age his face was badly disfigured when some coals set his clothes on fire. His family moved to Philadelphia where they lived in poverty. He managed to scrape by teaching drawing and playing piano in silent movie houses. Kahn won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1924. He later taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
His career didn't really take off until he was in his fifties. A trip through Greece, Rome, and Egypt opened him up to a special vision of architecture filled with mystery and monumentality. In a film clip showing Kahn teaching, he says: "I asked the brick, 'What do you like brick?' And the brick said, 'I like an arch.' '' This spiritual perception of things made him an oddball in the rational world of the university and in the practical world of big business.
Architect Philip Johnson tells Nathaniel that "Artists don't get jobs," as he comments on some of the troubles Kahn had with clients because of his idealism and high principles. But the soft spoken I. M. Pei, who managed to get many more contracts that Nathaniel's father, says that "three or four masterpieces are better than 50 or 60 buildings." When the filmmaker travels to La Jolla, California, to see the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences designed by his father, he catches the sun setting in the Pacific and sending a shimmer of light on a shaft of water in the midst of the buildings. A man who worked with Kahn there comments on his genius but points out that one time he was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that his efforts on a project were not acceptable. Others confirm that Kahn had no sense of time or grounding in the ordinary decencies of life. He often brought a small rug to the office and slept on it after working late into the night.
Nathaniel interviews other architects, his half sisters, other relatives, and even some cabbies who recall his father. The filmmaker seems genuinely moved by those who were emotionally touched by Kahn as well as those who evidence a reverence for his work. His visits to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the National Assembly Hall in Dhaka, Bangladesh, provide the dramatic high points in this unusual and compelling documentary. These masterworks convey the mystery and the timeless qualities that make Louis Kahn's creations so spiritual. By the end of this quest, his son has a brighter and more rounded understanding and appreciation of his father as a man and as an artist.
