Sunday, May 22, 2011

My Architect ~ A Son's Journey


In this poignant, powerful, moving, and for me, ultimately sad journey, we accompany Nathaniel Kahn as he navigates the labyrinth of his father's life.

His was no average father; he was visionary architect Louis I. Kahn, widely considered the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century.  Nathaniel bravely exposes his heart and mind as he attempts to discover and make peace with the father he barely knew and lost to death at age eleven.  Nathaniel embarked on this exploratory film journey twenty-six years later, and the result received both acclaim and awards in 2003 and 2004.

Why sad for me?   Because the legacy of damage, pain and loss that haunted Nathaniel's soul and prompted this cathartic journey can't be underestimated, excused, or compensated by his father's greatness.  There are those who disagree.  Architect Shamsul Wares, standing with Nathaniel in the majestic, soaring, beautifully futuristic capital building of Bangladesh designed by his Nathaniel's father, tearfully and movingly tells the son:
He loved everybody; to love everybody, he sometimes did not see the very closest ones.  That is inevitable for men of his stature.
Where do our expectations of parental love, care, and devotion originate?   In our societal values and within the historic "sanctity" of marriage that has historically created "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children:  ugly, cruel terms I've always despised despite being "legitimate" myself.  How dare our institutions, some of them supposedly moral, just, and caring, stigmatize and degrade this way?!  And yet they did and still do.  Thanks to youth, this is finally changing.  Young people are rejecting these restrictive, discriminatory values and recognizing the less comfortable, less stabilizing but truthful human reality that while conception can occur out of great love, it isn't necessarily a considered or desired outcome.

Nathaniel was born out of wedlock in a less forgiving time. That he was conceived in great love is indisputable - we see and feel that during his brave conversations with his mother - but his father neither subscribed to, nor felt bound by society's conventions.  The love between Nathaniel's parents was manifested differently in him, as it always is with the children of any union.  Some of us accept this more easily than others.  Louis Kahn was a free spirit, a creative and eccentric genius who undoubtedly loved his son from the few glimpses we see; but who acknowledged his moral shortcomings.  He was a father who followed his own unique path, one that neglected the emotional needs and longings of his son.

Nathaniel doesn't directly address the brutal, judgmental morality of his youth, no doubt out of respect for his mother, but it must also have inflicted deep scars as he grew up. How could it not deepen wounds of lonliness and abandonment?

Everyone who takes this film journey will experience it differently.  It's a complex, remarkable, affecting trip via Nathaniel's mind and heart.  Along the way, we're exposed to some of Louis Kahn's magnificent architecture, his former colleagues, staff and friends, and those whom he loved. 

Kahn's Salk complex in California is a masterpiece, and is considered so by one of our greatest living architects, I.M. Pei.  Referring to it in a conversation with Nathaniel, he says:
Architecture must have an element of time.  How can you judge a work today?  Let's say a work by any one of these modern architects that you know about.  It's exciting and wonderful, and then what'll happen to it twenty, fifty years later?  That's the measure ... that's right.  That it'll always be as perfect as it was conceived.  The mystique may fade away, but the spirituality of that project will remain.  Now that building will stand the test of time, no question about it.
Nathaniel felt there was something spiritual about the Salk space and for the first time since his father died, while there among those buildings, he felt he was getting closer to his father.

While interviewing someone who'd worked with his father and had been unaware of Nathaniel's existence, Nathaniel was asked, "Did you know him (your father) well?"  Nathaniel replied, "I had a sense for him, and I saw him once a week, maybe.  That's about all."  Words delivered without emotion, yet conveying so much.

Louis Kahn was sixty-one years old when Nathaniel was born, had three different families all at once who lived within several miles of each other, but who never crossed paths until Kahn's funeral.

Two great architects, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn, created masterpieces and yet lived turbulent, chaotic emotional lives.  It makes one wonder about the nature of genius.

This film is about the complexity of the human heart; the courage to love in defiance of accepted societal values; the price that's exacted; the capacity to accept and forgive; and to ultimately find peace in the shadow of genius.

It bears repeat viewing, and its richness can't be overstated.  It lingers and haunts.

Nathaniel, I hope you found lasting peace.