An architect and a man

CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

What is the measure of a successful life? Whether you achieved a level of fame and/or fortune in your professional life? Whether you treated people well? By most measures, the late world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn would be considered a failure, but the situation is not clear-cut. On the one hand, he created some of the most important buildings in the 20th century and has left an indelible, positive impression on many people. On the other hand, he was a workaholic taskmaster, who died alone and bankrupt, leaving behind a wife and daughter, two mistresses and two illegimate children. His fascinating story is told in My Architect, now playing at Cinemark Tinseltown.

Directed and produced by Kahn's son, Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect is about a son trying to understand his father. It is powerful not only because of Kahn senior's remarkable life story – which began on the Estonian island of Osel in 1901 or 1902 – but because the film will make viewers think about how well they really know their own family/friends.

Having emigrated to Philadelphia with his family in 1906, Louis Kahn grew up in the United States, made money teaching, drawing, and playing the piano in silent movie houses. He graduated with a degree in architecture in 1924 and struggled throughout the 1930s and 1940s to define his architectural style and obtain commissions, made difficult in part by his uncompromising artistic sensibility and his being Jewish in a profession that had few Jews.

It wasn't until he was in his 50s, and with the help of his wife, Esther Israeli, that Kahn started to find some professional success. A trip to Rome in 1951 inspired his creativity – he turned from the modernist steel and glass esthetic of the time to one of concrete, brick and wood. He designed such buildings as the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Tex. His crowning glory, that was completed almost 10 years after his death in 1974, was the Capital Complex at Dhaka, Bangladesh.

From the interviews conducted by Nathaniel Kahn, we see that Louis Kahn's peers greatly admired the architect's talents. We see the buildings that Kahn brought to life – the spiritual places he created with his use of materials, geometric designs and his great appreciation of light. We also see Kahn's imperfections, not only his scarred face from an accident when he was three years old, but his fractured, nomadic life that ended alone and penniless with a heart attack in the men's room at New York's Penn Station – it took days for someone to identify his body and his children saw each other for the first time at his funeral.

But his buildings remain. They are monuments to his life, as are his children, who seem to be living happy, productive lives. One of the interviewees in My Architect points out the cracks in a concrete wall of the Salk Institute, and remarks that Louis Kahn, in his designs, liked to keep these imperfections visible, perhaps feeling that they added to the beauty and humanity of the building. While it seems that Kahn, in his personal life, tried to hide his imperfections – his three families, for example – My Architect exposes them. In doing so, the younger Kahn has created a monument of his own that truly honors his father.

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