rupertbreheny Review of My Architect

My Architect (2003)

At times as heavy and unremitting as the buildings of his father, Nathaniel Kahn's documentary is at once weighty, compelling and profound.

[7/10 · 26 August 2004]

I can't say I warmed to Louis Kahn or his architecture. Each edifice seems peculiarly ponderous, brutally imposing themselves on the landscape. Buildings so wrapped up in their own sparse, Cartesian ideal that they offer no comfort or concession to the humanity expected to inhabit them. Could they in fact be a microcosm of the man himself?

So bound up was he in his accomplishments that he avoided confronting the disaster of his own personal life. With three estranged families of fatherless children, he left a swathe of heartache in those that fell into his gravitational pull.

Is this the cost exacted for great works, the tragedy being that the price was paid by those that loved the man?