Louis Kahn was a hero of mine while I was studying, I felt he injected modernism with a substance and a dream of immortality if not the reality. So I bought the DVD of my architect by Louis Kahn’s son recently. It really is a fantastic film, and somewhat beautiful. The buildings at first perhaps not fully realised and the Architect Louis Kahn shown walking towards or away from the camera also seems hard to understand, how could he live like he did in simultaneous parallel lives that rarely crossed? But as the film goes on both the Architecture and the man come through in a different perspective, and you come to understand both more profoundly, although the man Louis Kahn seems at the end of the film still to be lurking in the background. Is it a film for non Architects, yes definitely, but those who don’t know the subject of the film already will have to rely more on the human story of a famous Architect who has ’secret’ families.Nathaniel Kahn’s film deals in subjects that are universal but criminally neglected in film often. How does a man’s work and life relate to each other? How is emotion and empathy resolved in concrete form? Film and Architecture have something in common, in the use of light and materialisation of ideas. Nathaniels film is a thing of rare beauty like the works of his father.
