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Arts: Father Figured
David B. Green
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When Nathaniel Kahn was a boy, three decades ago, he used to see his father only when the older man dropped in on him and his mother, in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. Usually a visit came in the evening, with enough warning for his mother to "whip up a five-course meal and prepare my father a martini in a frozen glass." At the end of the visit, the three would drive Louis Kahn back to his home, some 10 miles away, in Center City. For Nathaniel, whole days spent in the company of his father were very few in number.
One reason his dad was not around much was that, as a world-famous architect, Louis Kahn was often on the road building, in places like India and Bangladesh, the type of creations that few in America -- and none in Philadelphia -- would give him the chance to undertake. The other reason was that Nathaniel�s mother, Harriet Pattison, was not Louis Kahn�s wife. That title belonged to the former Esther Israeli, and it was to her and their daughter Sue Ann that Kahn would return at the end of both his journeys and his prandial visits to Chestnut Hill.
Living in California was another woman, Anne Tyng -- like Pattison an architect who had worked in Kahn�s office -- who also had loved her boss, a surprisingly charismatic man of slight build, a full head of white hair, and a gnomish face that had been disfigured by fire when he was a child. Tyng had decided she needed to get far away from Kahn in order to raise the daughter, Alexandra, she had had by him.
Nathaniel was only 11 when his dad died, in 1974, at the age of 73. He attended the funeral, but he and Harriet were kept apart from Kahn�s legitimate family; neither were they mentioned in a page 1 obituary in The New York Times. He never knew much about his father and only when he attended Yale in the 80s did Nathaniel became more aware of his father�s architectural stature: Louis Kahn designed the Yale Art Gallery and its British Art Center, both considered masterpieces. But it was even later, around 1990, that Nathaniel, by now working as a filmmaker in New York, got the push to track down Louis Kahn. He had been summoned to the deathbed of a friend of his father�s whom he himself barely knew. The man, a landscape architect, felt an urgent need to tell Nathaniel that "your father was a remarkable man. You should find a way to know more about him."
He did. The fruit of his five-year quest to know Lou Kahn better is a new two-hour documentary film, "My Architect," that screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival this July, and will open in cities around the U.S. in November. It is a movie that succeeds on all counts: aesthetically; psychologically, as the tale of a son understanding and coming to terms with a less-than-perfect father; and as a palate-whetting primer about one of the 20th century�s seminal architects.
Louis Kahn was born in 1901 (or 1902) in Estonia. When he was 3, shortly before the family emigrated to the U.S., he picked some glowing coals out of the kitchen fire and stuck them in the apron he was wearing. His clothes caught fire, and the boy was badly burned, leaving him scarred around his mouth and on his hands. Nathaniel tells us in the film that Lou�s mother believed the accident was a sign that her son would achieve greatness. What he doesn�t mention is that while making the film, he himself learned the midrash about Moses being guided by the Angel Gabriel to put hot coals in his mouth, helping him pass a fatal test of Pharaoh, but crippling his power of speech. He also came to understand that his father had known the midrash and "was fascinated by it."
Making "My Architect" was in a way a crash course in Judaism for Nathaniel, whose mother, from an Episcopalian family, raised him without religion. His father emerged from an archetypical Jewish immigrant family to America of a century ago. He grew up among the brick factories of North Philadelphia, rather than the Lower East Side, but his family was impoverished, and moved 17 times during their first two years in the country, "always one step ahead of the bill collector," explained Nathaniel, in an interview with The Report.
When Lou received a piano from a wealthy benefactor, but there was no room for it at home, he got rid of his bed, and slept in the piano. He won drawing competitions too as a child, and was exposed to the history of architecture by an inspiring teacher at Central High School, the city�s school for gifted boys. In 1924, he earned his degree of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. It was only in 1951, though, when he was resident at the American Academy in Rome that Lou, says his son, had "his �Eureka� moment." He studied not only the ruins of the Roman Empire, but visited Egypt and Greece as well. "What he saw changed his life," says Nathaniel in the film. "He wanted to build modern buildings that had the feeling of ancient monuments."
And the buildings that followed -- the Salk Institute in La Jolla (finished 1965), Fort Worth�s Kimbell Art Museum (1972), Yale�s British Art Center (1974), and the National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1983) -- have a stark, timeless feel to their exteriors. Inside, however, the architect took great care to attend to the physical and spiritual needs of the people who would be using them. "He was constantly redesigning, leaving nothing unthought of. He was wandering through his buildings," in his mind, says his son. And invariably, the effect of the interiors, large open spaces, infused with natural light, that lead the eye upward, is both embracing and uplifting. This could have been true, too, of what may have been the greatest of Kahn�s many unrealized designs -- that for a rebuilt Hurva synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. (After Kahn�s death, the plan was put on ice, but every few years the subject of realizing either his or another plan for the Hurva is redebated here.)
Nathaniel shot 200 hours of film and video for "My Architect," only 1 percent of which appears in the film. As a consequence perhaps, every interview and every shot is startling and fresh, and the interviewees so articulate and filled with presence that they come off, agrees the director, like actors. Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei, each with those bizarre, round, black-framed glasses, try to convince the son that Lou Kahn was a greater artist than either of them. Edward Bacon, the man who blocked Kahn from taking part in the redevelopment of Center City Philadelphia, is still furious at the architect (everything Kahn proposed for the city was "brutal, totally insensitive"), though he�s been dead nearly 30 years. Robert Boudreau, conductor of a wind orchestra that performs around North America from a steel barge designed by Kahn, begins to cry when Nathaniel, whom he�s invited onto his boat to film, but largely ignored all afternoon, reveals that he is Lou Kahn�s son. And Harriet still insists that Lou Kahn intended to divorce Esther and move in with her and Nathaniel when he returned that March from India, and died of a heart attack in New York�s Penn Station. (His body lay unclaimed in a city morgue for three days, in part because he had crossed out the address in his passport -- proof, says Harriet, that he was planning to move.)
When Nathaniel visits Jerusalem, and learns from Teddy Kollek about the "quarreling of the Jews" that prevented the reconstruction of the Hurva, and from Moshe Safdie about Kahn�s visit to the Judean Desert in 1967, we can see that the son is on his way to cultivating his own connection to the Jewish people and their state. Today, he says that though "officially, I�m not Jewish," he feels very much that he is. "I never really felt part of my mother�s family," he says, explaining in jest: "I don�t think their jokes are funny. I�m not good at ball sports. I�m not a sailor."
It�s clear that he is still figuring out the meaning of this new identity. He is fascinated with the stories of the Bible, and is "intensely interested in the future of Israel." He also envies the strong sense of community that he thinks characterizes Jews and Israel, even if he hasn�t yet figured out what sort of Jewish community he wants to be connected to, or whether that connection should have a ritual component to it.
Kahn describes his own visit to Ahmedabad, India, to shoot the Indian Institute of Management that his dad designed (1963). "Here come five Indians walking up to me -- absolutely Indian. They turn around -- and are wearing yarmulkes. And they say, �Mr. Kahn please, come with us on Friday night. We have a beautiful synagogue. But there are not many of us.�" He says that of course he accepted their invitation, and felt "completely at home with them."
And finally, at the film�s end, he visits Bangladesh, where Louis Kahn�s largest, greatest project was finished only nine years after his death: the National Assembly building in the capital, Dhaka. There, at dawn, he sees people exercising on the plaza that surrounds the massive structure, and meets the "morning workers," maintenance people who warmly tell him how happy they are to meet the son of the architect "Louis Farrakhan." When he corrects them, they nod, smiling, but it�s clear the humor of the misidentification is lost on them. It�s an amazing moment, one can even say, an ecumenical one. It was here, in a nascent Muslim country, that this Eastern European Jew was given the opportunity to, in his son�s words, "create a world in which we are inspired to be better people, and contribute and give back. Those are Jewish ideals." The irony is that Nathaniel suspects his father was chosen because "Khan" is so common a name among Muslims.
Nathaniel�s last interview is with a Bangladeshi architect named Shamsul Wares, who tells him that Louis Kahn was "like Moses for us. He gave us democracy." Kahn�s capital complex appears today on local currency; surrounded by lawns and pools, it is a site where residents of the capital congregate. Though it is massive and lacking in ornamentation, it doesn�t have the quality of sterility and apartness that a national center like Brasilia is said to have.
By the end of "My Architect," Nathaniel has met with both his sisters and with Anne Tyng (Esther died in 1996), and begun to forge the bonds of family with them. Each one paid a price for the way Louis Kahn chose to live his life. But in reading postcards written by a traveling father to his young son, in which he says, "I hope someday I can teach you to be a better man than I have been," Nathaniel says he understands that Lou was suffering too. This was "a conflicted man," he says, someone "who was aware there was a boy there who needed his attention," but also someone who, no less, "needs his son. It�s made him so much more human to me. There were things he didn�t know how to have in his life."
Arts
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